Crematorium

Is this everything -
your name printed on paper
two bunches of flowers
and thirty-one people with your genes?

Stories don't live on a string of DNA.
Near Reykjavik, wildflowers grew on your war tales;
the eyes that saw them are now part of the air
and the ears that they told will be ruptured.

How much loss can flesh still tolerate -
until our own have followed us, into the quiet
of this place? I know it well - that printed name,
the flowers on the half moon terrace
when the flowers of Iceland will be gone.