Little burning bundle,
hungry flames lapping at the offering,
smells of cinders sloping skyward,
the breeze carrying vestiges of it, embers, away,
little tornado touching down,
dispensing a simulacrum of symmetry
to a service both celebratory and austere,
we gather here today
as a remembrance and restitution
because we were born
with a clean conscious to a dirty world,
where the soot of past sacrifices stick to our skin,
and we, unknowing calves,
walk to sacrifice ourselves for the sins of our forebears,
similarly stained
to us.
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