Toni Artuso
Sands of Time
“Up to 4 percent of the sand [of Omaha beach] is made up of … shrapnel …”
—Archaeology, Sept./Oct. 2012
Bill Barnes, who stumbled ashore at Normandy
vomiting sea water, gasps for breath again,
but this time, his lungs won’t clear; he can’t cough up
a tumor. He suffocates while his brothers—
by blood and in arms—minutes, miles apart
die of failed kidneys, livers, brains, and hearts.
Yet the French coast where they swarmed years ago
is salted with angular grains, iron,
sand blasted to glass by heat of bursting shells.
Rust, storms will carry away these vestiges,
but, by the time the earth’s scars disappear,
their grandchildren, in their turn, will be dust.
“I wrote this in 2013, as the last of the WWII veterans, including my in-laws, were passing en masse of old age and joining their comrades who died during the war in the so-called ‘bivouac of the dead.’ When I read what is now the epigraph of the poem, I was struck by the way that, long after the participants who were scarred by an armed conflict depart this life—and even their children and children’s children die—the land itself still remembers the fighting by bearing the scars of armed conflict.” —Toni Artuso
Toni Artuso (she/her/hers) is an emerging/aging trans female writer from Salem, Massachusetts, who is trying to accelerate the emerging and slow the aging. Her verse has appeared in Honeyguide Literary Magazine, which nominated one of her villanelles for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems have also appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, the Pieces of Salem anthology, Instant Noodles, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Channel, The Ekphrastic Review, Jersey Devil Press, Eclectica, Space City Underground Literary Magazine, Nixes Mate Review, and Molecule. X (Twitter): @TAltrina. Instagram: @tonialtrina.
