2. Waker

You were always a contrary one.

I suppose you do that to remind the rest of us,
when we grow too enmeshed in our own minutiae,
when we are too comfortably oblivious
to pain no more our own.
Yours is the klaxon call,
the strident insistence that
what is lost is not forgotten.
So when the sleeper stirs from unsettled dreams,
troubled, plagued with
injustice, old resentments,
things left unsaid—
your cry seeks to right it,
even if it must ruin the rest of us to do it.
Thus it happens,
when bones are violently cast into the earth,
buried before any protest can utter,
you appear,
sounding the alarum to all who walk,
shattering the ignorance of the night.