Brown Paper Grocery Bag Drawings I was four or five years old and knew This boy and that girl only from afar Sounds from their moving lips Not words just strange noises They looked like drawings of people Made with a yellow pencil On a brown paper bag, then erased Not a new yellow pencil On the first day of school But the kind of pencil that someone Chews and bites, a stubby pencil With a hard nub of a pink eraser I did not play with these children They did not play with me Their mothers looked at the dirt Their mothers were also erased Drawings on brown grocery bags No one spoke of these wraiths Beings that came one week And vanished the next Hauntingly invisible Five Birthday Candles and a Gauze Fuse Having been born after World War II, what would I, as a small child know of massive scale human displacement? How was my little brain to deal with the idea that most men I saw had two legs and my neighbor only one. I took it as mat...