print previewback NICHOLAS CARDELL GORE
Bring Back the Dead
Bring back the dead.
The sons and daughters of the soil.
The witnesses to sunrise and
translators of crystal. The inheritors
of glass who discovered fire.
The children who live under the blanket
of ash which powders their roofs,
who draw buckets of oil from wells
to capture the moon in the reflection.
They see the sky as a mirror—
the earth molded from their own
hammered little bodies.
Bring back the dead from dust,
where chewy gristle and marrow
of bone echoes hollow.
From the corners of our plots and tombs—
for death is to the future as age is to illness
and youth, catalogued all the same.
A book lays in silent rigor.
Its skin stale, its soul still
to the wind. 
Bring Back the Dead
Nigredo (The Precondition for Circumstance)