A belt buckle and a pocket-knife
Was all of him that was left.
She remembered him cutting fruit
In his Sunday suit
With his strong hands quick and deft.

She never saw the bones.
After ten grim months alone
She no longer wished to see
A carcass, blood-long-gone
Could be anyone.

One bullet to the temple,
One in the back of the head.
When they tied then shot him,
They shot them both instead.

The brutal cleansing act,
A fact but not yet real to her.
Haunted by the paltry artefacts
That meant a great deal to her.

The village had cried and also the towns,
Even for men of no wide renown
The reasons as much as the losses mourned.
He died only yards from where he was born.

A belt buckle and a pocket-knife,
Meagre remnants of a life.
The hard, angled steel took on a fluid feel
As she stared, then back; cold and real.

Her's a world of sorrow in a single tear.
A generation’s grief in a tiny sphere.