Found Poem: "Death Investigators"

Death investigators

Bodies filled with bullet fragments

Clothes stained in blood and pocked with glass and wood shards

Bodies that have been lying for weeks in spring rains

With alarming frequency, the bodies are headless.

The government discovers new victims in homes and graves daily

By late March, as Ukrainian forces took back occupied towns around Kyiv 

Bodies started arriving 

In the back of refrigerated tractor-trailers 

faster than morgues could process them. 

Perovskyi’s younger brother, a medical school student, started assisting him

"As you examine the body,

You do not perceive it as a dead person. 

It is the object of study. 

But later, it catches up.”

He’s not sure 

He can afford to dive deeply 

Into his emotions 

About the war 

And his role 

While it’s still happening.

“Every single body I treat with respect,” he says. 

“You have to do it.”

Everybody has their front line.

The notion that he has family members 

Who believe the war is justified — 

Who believe people should die this way — 

Is too much for Perovskyi to handle right now.

At 6 a.m., he wakes up on an army cot 

And heads to the morgue. 

He focuses on the endless line of lifeless victims in front of him. 

He still whispers some version of a question that once seemed very simple.

“Why did you die?”

Words and lines taken from the text of "One body at a time, a Kyiv coroner documents Ukraine’s death toll," Washington Post, 20 April 2022