Knotted Wrack

This morning, millions of ghost crabs
spray the beach, arranged by some sequence
of moons. Their opaque claws, each smaller
than a droplet, serrated with godly precision.
Knobbed whelk, shark eye, slippersnail,
all tangled in knotted wrack.
Creatures populate a swath of sand
or run desperate alongside a cargo plane.
Bodies in the fuel-wake of a C-17
so massive, it carries hundreds away
but leaves thousands behind. Today,
Bagram Airbase became a morgue.
Nature makes the mollusk and the man.
The pilot who drowns out cries
with the engine’s roar. Low tide sweeps
a million blinking blue mussels back
into the green mouth of the sea. From the sky,
bright dots of color might be mistaken
for flowers, sprouting through cracks
in the runway. Or human bodies,
flailing their arms at the roiling sky.