They looked at their daughter standing with her music
in her hand, the page covered with dots and
lines, with its shared language. They knew
families had been taken. What they did not know
was the way he would pick her cello up
by the scroll neck and take its amber
torso-shape and lift it and break it
against the fireplace. The brickwork crushed the
close-grained satiny wood, they stood and
stared at him.
Burning, he kept the plane up
long enough for the crew to jump. He could
feel the thrust down, and the lift,
each time one of them leapt, full-term, the
parachutes unfolding and glistening, little
sacs of afterbirth. They drifted toward
what could be long lives, his fist
seared to the stick. When he’d felt all six
leave him, he put the nose down
and saw the earth coming up toward him,
green as a great basin of water
being lifted to his face.