One of the men lifted his head and looked at me as we sloped past the ash fields, and rows of toilers like grey bamboo canes if bamboo was stooped and bent with brittle hands knuckle white against the plastic handled hoes.   Her hands, smaller, firmer, sure, came down on my shoulders shadowed his face with fear.   An explanation in a classroom pretending it isn’t an excuse claims to be progress, claims to be a new world built on the broken bones of the last.   Mothers scream during childbirth. There is blood and pain and sometimes death.   We are lucky we are not all toiling. If the old world had their way who knows what would have happened? We are smarter these days we can laugh at the facts that shattered when the world changed.   Who know what will happen at the next night rise.