Down the street, by the line of crippled old men,

    each waiting his turn patiently to fill an urn

From the ruptured water pipe, a donkey is dying,

    one of its legs shattered and gangrenous,

But still it walks, as if some labor remained for it

    among the piles of bricks and smoking timbers,

and one of the men strokes its flank as it passes,

    remembering the garden with perfect living rows,

His father’s donkeys turning and turning the wooden wheel

    drawing from the shallow aquifer a stinking sulfurous water

That tasted of its own future seeping through communal graves.