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Searchers

By D. Nurkse D. Nurkse

We gave our dogs a button to sniff,

or a tissue, and they bounded off

confident in their training,

in the power of their senses

to recreate the body,

but after eighteen hours in rubble

where even steel was pulverized

they curled on themselves

and stared up at us

and in their soft huge eyes

we saw mirrored the longing for death:

then we had to beg a stranger

to be a victim and crouch

behind a girder, and let the dogs

discover him and tug him

proudly, with suppressed yaps,

back to Command and the rows

of empty triage tables.

But who will hide from us?

Who will keep digging for us

here in the cloud of ashes?

Source: Poetry (September 2002).

Biography

D. Nurkse is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Rules of Paradise (2001), The Fall (2003), and The Border Kingdom (2008). His parents escaped Nazi Europe during World War II—his Estonian father worked for the League of Nations in Vienna, his mother was an artist—and moved to New York. Nurkse’s family moved back to live in Europe for a number of years, returning to the United States around the time of the . . .

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