Bag of Bones

The mass graveyard is both the setting of the poem and its most powerful symbol: It embodies the crimes that the dictator has been committing against his people and the human cost of this tragedy. Just as the mass grave represents the deaths of countless victims, so too do the bones the unnamed woman is retrieving represent the bones of all the other nameless victims: “His bones, like thousands of bones / in the mass graveyard” (Lines 7-8). The fact that these bones all look the same speaks to the erasure these victims have undergone: They have been erased from society and their ordinary lives through an act of mass violence, and are now reduced to anonymity.

The surreal and unnatural nature of a mass grave is further highlighted by the speaker’s description of the grave site as “noisy with skulls and bones and dust” (Line 19), the allusion to sound suggesting that the dead do not and cannot rest in peace in such a place. In an interesting reversal, the speaker chooses to describe a scene from past life with her loved one as quiet, while the grave is what is loud: “when he kissed her / there, quietly / not in this place” (Lines 16-17).