Vanished
by Diane Elayne Dees
The wall of memories at St. Paul's Chapel
has come down. The flags and photos,
letters and mementos all hidden away
in boxes in a storage room. Grief poured out
in Chinese, loyalty in German, sympathy
in Swahili, tribute in French — the tears
of the world turned to ink, now dried,
unseen. The weeping ceased, the place
where the wall used to be, now another gap
in the shadow of the Great Gap, where bulldozers
make circles in the ground, men in hardhats
read notes on clipboards, and no one cries.