A Poem

In my introductory creative writing course, we've been spending these first few weeks focusing on poetry - reading and writing lots of poetry. This is one of the more recent ones of mine: a political poem. Before I go into too much explanation, I'll let you read it:

"Shadows"

A woman who wore a checkered shirt now has checkered skin,

branded by the heat.

Corpses unclaimed, unidentifiable; faces burned, clothes burned, skin burned black.

A mountain of hollow skulls, the remains of those killed, too numerous to bury properly.

Everything is burned. The ground, the rubble, the sky - all black with ash and smoke,

as if nothing will ever look the same again,

as if nothing will ever be bright and alive again.

Everything is melted, leveled, piled up in smoking heaps of debris and body parts.

That corpse was a person once.

Did they love someone? Did they have children?

They are burned for the crimes of those with more power, more threat, like an offering.

A sacrifice.

Closest to the blast, there are no remains at all.

But on a bridge, there are two discolored patches.

Shadows.

Shadows of people who were standing right there, and now . . .

only shadows. Their ghosts, eternally embedded in the concrete.

Maybe they were the lucky ones. Maybe they didn't feel it.

At least there is a record that they were there.

That they existed.

That there was a time when they were real, and alive.

No one knows their names, or what their voices sounded like.

But there is proof.

They were right there.

I originally wanted this to be a prose poem, but Jordan pointed out to me that prose poems aren't supposed to have line breaks, so I'm not really sure what it is. I tried to use the line breaks for dramatic affect.

Thoughts?