From the Verse Essays of Ivar Benløs: The Dignity With Which We Have Lived Our Lives

How easily victims can
Become the perpetrators
Noted Arundhati Roy.
Perhaps it is because we
Are all the victims of death
That we perpetrate so much
Death, and it is because we

Are all the victims of life
That we insist on living.
By "we" the author means all
Us living things and dying
Assemblages, tottering
Across Earth's landscapes littered
With green beings constructed

From fossils made from fossils
Whose taphonomies suggest

Why Efremov seized the word
Itself, "the burial law,"
To describe the transitions
Of all our bestiaries

Through night's ark of gardening.