A drab drop drips
Downed casualty
Down casually.

A sulfuric gust cycles
In three fly-by nights.
A gust hoping,
A breeze yearning to dab a wet tear off a moistened spring cheek.
Floating by on a wisp of breath,
Breathed once by the blessed. Now irreparably tainted, then incomprehensible anew:
Treated by the respirations of the perspiring, expending breath on czarist ears, aspiring;
Cured by the tongues of the insatiably dying
And by those primary soothe-ers, invisibly crying.
Alveoli gripping that sine qua non of civilization
Until they must release the once-oxygen into the hills of Kyivan Rus.

A first breath and second
As much as a penultimate and final.
And witness to the chronology that led to such a
Bloodbath-blessed blast
As this.