The Exiled Dead Poem by Hans Ostrom

The list of those who did not live
to witness the reconciliation is a long one.

Trees tremble and toss.
Their shadows shift on damp ground
covering caskets of dead exiles
exumed from foreign soil, returned.

A monarach, or a president, or some high-ranking
official of the new government
places a wreath on a new monument
erected just outside the city;
the address to those assembled is appropriately
simple, and people begin forgetting it
as they scurry through drizzle
that steams off still-warm hoods
of automobiles.

Bodies are just bodies, some will say.
Some will say death exiles us all.

But in a tavern here the other day
I overheard some say that the dead exiles
would not be forgotten by means of this
official rememberance. And it does seem
as if their souls linger
at the edge of this present calm, touching
the new government's dream of order
like silent probing legs of spiders.

One way or another the dead exiles
will come home, remind us of a version
of the past the new cabinet tries
to recast in our minds with visions
of gleaming smokestacks, wit somber
ceremonies in the rain.

The shadows of the exiled dead brood and shift
over the new bodies and the new peace of the new homeland.

Published in Harvest (Univ. of Houston) , vol.42,1978.