one small corner of the universe

I wonder if this is what Pompeii was like
in the weeks and months after Vesuvius blew,
ash and broken furniture littering the rooms
where children played, friends laughed, where music
and literature, science and mathematics drifted
like smoke through the open doors and windows.
There are no stone encrusted bodies here, clinging
for dear life, no vacant-eyed dogs begging–only
ghostly cats nesting in the wreckage, peering out
from behind an upturned desk, a charred bookcase,
the art studio floor, no longer on the second story–
but there are voices in these eerie halls,
like those I heard in the stone streets that long ago summer,
voices of teachers and books and bells rising
into the air, mingling with the black dust and the sounds
of bulldozers and backhoes come to bury the past.