PAD Day 10: A Country of Grief

 Today's prompts from Write Better Poetry and NaPoWriMo: Write a "mini" poem (10 lines or less) or a poem that focuses on something "mini" that's longer, and (2) "In his poem, 'Goodbye,' Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the 'container' for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.

The two prompts work together pretty well, except Brock's poem is 12 lines long, not 10. I did write a 12-line poem on the topic of grief, but I won't share that one here today. Instead, I rewrote a short three-stanza poem that I had written last month, reworking all the stanzas, especially the second one, to include questions as in Brock's poem. So it's  a little longer than specifiied in Robert's prompt, but it does have an element of "mini" (or "small") incorporated into it. I felt it needed to be shared even more than the first one I wrote.

Holes in Minab
 
We are not sure what the drone sees at first—
dozens of rectangular holes, some still undug,
their dimensions etched in the dirt,
near the rubble that used to be a school.
 
What are those little holes in the ground?
They are scars, the wailing of souls.
What will go in those holes in the ground?
The remains of more than a hundred children.
 
Three reckless rockets found their mark.
Three reckless rockets fired by our country.
The holes look so small from up here.
And we, too, are so very small.