No one knows numbness like a stonecutter's hands — striking a slab with names of bones as a typewriter pounds a platen. Each bone tag grows the obelisk by the length of a child's clavicle — the skeleton stretches skyward in hopes someone sees, and remembers. Wondering, what we are remembering — Are these Trakl's unborn grandchildren? strike, strike, maybe these are Bly's bodies, counted as a keepsake? strike, strike, perhaps these are the flowers in Flanders Fields or do these Bloody stones sing of Sonnets? Pausing peacefully, the stonecutter sharpens his chisel, waiting for next round of bones.
References:
Grodek, by Georg Trakl. Translated here by Gerald J. Woolf.
Counting Small Boned Bodies by Robert Bly.
In Flanders Field by John McCrae, and my response to that poem on SUM FLUX with Mountains of the Living Dead.
The Bloody Sonnets, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav.
I like the many links you make in the poem, branching into other poems, which in contrast to the stonecutter engraving names of the dead gives something to think of, thanks.
I agree with Benno; I appreciate the layers you put into this: relating stonework, anti-war sentiment and references to Flanders and of course "Bloody Sonnets."
One thing I've been thinking about lately: Dadaism, surrealism, etc. came about as a critique against the extreme rationality and reason that many believed led us to World War I. These days, we're very much ruled by a rationalist world ideology—and look what that's done to the level of fighting. I think maybe they were on to something. (I'd also make the argument that abandoning myth and intuition for reason and philosophy is what got both the Greeks and the Romans in serious trouble in the later parts of their empire.)