Indeed, it is difficult for most people to identify with the dead bones lying in the dust, and yet the poem shows this silent identification. This is a sacred process.
I remember a scene from a documentary film from many years ago in which a young man (the host in the film) was holding the hands of a very old woman who had been taken by the Japanese as a "comfort woman" to serve their soldiers. There was full of tenderness in the eyes of the young man in which I saw this sacred identification which purified everything, and this is why it has stayed in my mind ever since.
