Magpie Tales#54

In the week when a 6.3 Richter Scale earthquake struck South Island, New Zealand, Willow offers poets and writers this picture prompt. 

 Random

You ever see a big man really cry?

Even a man you’d think had seen it all?

Big Benny, captain of a Rescue Squad

that shifted slabs of brickwork, dug toward

the tap-tap-taps, the cries for help, the child.

What did they find, crushed in the bloody tomb

the shaking earth had fashioned? Benny said

“We were too late. Maybe five she’d be. Or six.

Her Ma had tried to shield her. She’d gone, too.”

He looked up, helpless, held out helpless hands.

“Their whole house had come down. The ceiling joists

had pinned them. Smashed them. But next door – next door

hardly a tile shook loose. Her puzzle neither.”

“Puzzle, Benny?”

                            “They’d made the kid’s jig-saw.

One with big lunky pieces for young kids.

She’d laid it on the floor, finished, all but for

the last piece she still held in her wee hand,

her wee mouth shaping ‘There’ – how,

I ask you, how could the house come down

and not shake out one piece, not one, yet kill.”

His hard-hat laid aside, his head laid down

onto his arms. His shoulders shook. Someone

said “He’s got kids too. Get the lad some tea.”

Outside. a thin rain falls damping the dust.

Folk jabber on cellphones, their day in chaos,

or sit, stare, ask how can they help, mothers,

old men, firecrews, paramedics, schoolboys,

those running they know not where to flee their fear,

even the petty thieves, pushers and crooks

today in these torn streets are worth his tears