Burn the clothes
you wore that day.
Save the ashes.
Bring them to the square
where we are fashioning
a monument of ashes.
Winds will rise,
soften the heroic shapes,
the paper faces
around the square will
become eyeless,
the sideshow
will depart to a muffle
of drums, leaving only
hollow sounds of wind--
and wind being wind,
the ashes will follow it,
leaving a swept field
of countless jagged stones.

©2002, Doug McClellan

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Doug McClellan is a maker of collages and assemblages who took up poetry when he turned seventy.

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