Faces of the Dead

S sent me this link earlier this week: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/20061228_3000FACES_TAB1.html It's a photo collage with portraits of all the soldiers who've been killed in Iraq, where each little photo is a block of a larger one and they reconfigure themselves as you click on individual squares. Kind of hard to explain, but go look at it if you want. I wrote this little paragraph that day because I couldn't come up with a poem immediately, but wanted to put some thoughts down right away.

Faces of the Dead

They are not really black and white anymore, just shades upon shades of grey, all equal in the past. Their names blur, their ranks, their states of origins, the dates of their deaths, each one just a part of the whole. They are overwhelmingly young. I see fear in the serious eyes in their photographs, but maybe I'm projecting. I want their stories. I want to know why they did it. My friend is coming home from the Air Force today, on leave before deploying; I want to ask her why, beg some explanation, find some sense beyond some 4,000 deaths, some 4,000 grey faces, shading away into nothing.