The tour guide asks
If I'd like to photograph
The bullet hole
In his forehead.
He was one of six survivors and
Gives white people tours five days a week
Of the forty thousand dead,
Pointing out his baby brother's bones,
His mother's skirt,
His lover's toes.
This survivor knows.
With a bullet to the head
He escaped death,
But not the days he lived
Piled amongst the dead.
Standing still and silent,
I respond only in smiling
To his insistence I take pictures
Of tragedy's remaining pieces and
Strangers' screaming skeletons.
Take more, he tells me, always.
A smile, one arm folded formally behind his back,
The other pointing from bone to bone.
I hold my camera to my eyes,
Pretend to press a button every few seconds
While following behind.
I can not take anything from a place already *****
Except for this man and the bullet he carries,
Nothing is left.
Here, I can not take photographs.