Before Amber Alerts

Their pictures were on milk cartons

and taped to toll-way booths.
They appeared briefly in advertising fliers

for carpet and upholstery cleaning:
these mug shots of missing children,
small line-ups stalled in their short,

photographic histories.

Maybe we have seen this child before

on his way to nowhere or in a grocery store

clutched by the wrong hand,

locked in a large grip,
or crying on some park bench

with not-so-childlike bruises 

far from home.

And what should we make of their absences,

like God's heart,

of those parents held in an escrow of death

while the earth hides them beneath its skin?