Hope Against

      (originally entitled "Eating the Diamond"

Picture a young woman or what's left: bones --

freezing, terrified, somehow conjuring a future.

She swallows a small stone, and perhaps

a week later, enough gathered in the intestine,

the horrid foreign-body cramps commence.

Furtively, she shifts through her own shit.

Again she swallows the gem,

along with the scant scraps keeping her

live enough to labor while dying.

And, again.

It's all she has for a dreamed-of child

with a man she may never meet.

Eat, shit, and so forth, through carnage

and cursing seasons.

Finally, the camps are liberated,

and she stands on a sun-soaked shore

facing west, scrawny palm cradling

the little diamond, which has sidled with

blood, mucus, anus.

She unfurls her fingers for just a few moments --

And -- light! wheels and wings off the tiny facets,

bold and brilliant enough

to illumine eternities of galaxies of nights.