The soft dawn resonated

Clumsily

Across the painted heather tombstone hillside

Outside the remnants

Of the village

Just west of Arles

There had been an apocalypse

Within the tunnels of the mines

Where all the wasted people had been holed up

Awaiting the end of the First World War

 

The mine shaft had caved in

Beneath the marching feet of Italian soldiers

Making their way across the coastline

Of provincial France

On their return to the peninsula

 

There had been a clamoring of birds

Circling in a crescendo of wings

Above the entrance to the cave

Just outside the falling walls of the town

 

The echoes of meandering feet

Remaining steadfast in their task

As each day opened up and then closed

Without so much as a ceremony

Of fingertips across the pages of a book

Above a bowl of oatmeal gruel

That had been presented as the treasure of the rising sun

 

The ardent laborers

Who had made their way

Back and forth

In unestimable tides

Of legs and feet and arms

And helmeted heads

Between the mineshaft and the town

Had come to rest uneasily

Beneath the crumbling rock and soil

Of the abandoned coal mine

Having spent methodical years at the labor

Only to die within the confines

Of their daily coffin

Long after the mine had closed

When its shafts had been emptied

Years before the war even began

 

Tethered to the cold embrace

Of the manufactured earth

Only to fall victim

To the trampling feet

Of Italian soldiers

Finally making the mineshaft into a prison

 

It always was but only temporary

Now shifting into permanence

Was an irony that beguiled

The methodically dancing fingers of Hemingway

As he pondered how best to evaporate the words

Across the nose of a glass

Of unaged rum

In the courtyard

Of his villa in Havana

 

Having focused all his attention

On the tribulations of the Spanish resistance

He had glossed over the metaphoric template

Drawn out by the trampling feet

Of the Italian regiment

That had left the only theatre

Of unexecuted violence

 

Where the trench warfare had been only

A delicately crafted monologue

Between the French commander

And his Italian counterpart

Who had known each other

Intimately before the war

And had accordingly scheduled

The dance of the militias

To correspond only with the falling tide

Of the war

 

Leaving every Italian soldier intact

To return their march to the peninsula

With the weight of guns, ammunition and boots

Heavy enough

To weigh down the wooden plank edificed mineshaft

And crush all the villagers that hid in its veins