Hawthorn Bones

'Twas a long hike over steep and unsteady terrain
Typing up lost favorite poems for some class again
But in them I find new instructions and tech support
For the mechanical sea where I've gone swimming.
Typical night. Dress destroyed by soot. A father waving
A white handkerchief spotted with bullet-sized blood
And dragging the near-dead through lead hail.
Not sure what happened to them all. I wasn't there.
I was watching a film about a photograph changing
Played through a computer in Jeannette Rankin hall.
But I found the picture in my research on Belfast.
It must've been taken in Derry in 1972. No internet.
I have family bones buried there, unable to visit,
Saline lungs and purple heath, violating the inviolate.
Andy's families who opened the ground for filling.
Then one day from out the mounds came my energy,
Sent to collect a message no one alive could translate.
It came back to bother me in a dream about good living.
That was before the griffin stopped running, so late;
Running gerunds into the ground with easy endings.