Imagine it: our deaths were silent. 
There was breath — a moment of still, suspended air
before the heat hit and we died before we could scream.
What a full moment, that breath before the burn.

We went to the water. Under snowfall of hot grey ash,
we hid in the boat sheds. Imagine it: a huddled mass
hopelessly praying. A father crying, a son weeping — 
worse, no boats are coming, and no one will remember. 

Our last breath cracked open like the earth had, a spew
of squirming, roiling death taking us in an instant.
Our hands and feet knotted up like we could run
back to the gentle warmth of our mothers’ wombs;

our lungs shriveled in poison air; our skin bubbled,
burst, evaporated; bones blackened and charred;
brains boiled in our skulls until the pressure peaked,
sending tissue through bone like stew over a too-small pot.

Some had a mangled, melting limb left looking 
for mercy, reaching to the sky — a prayer punished 
with a burn so brutal it carbonized flesh in a single
touch. That was the second wave, the fate-sealing wave.

Imagine it: a carbon arm buried under twenty meters
and two thousand years. Can you see it? Can you see
the mountain’s vomit making alchemy? We were gone
the moment it started to spit, and we were forgotten.

Imagine it. All that death, and no one came, our ash-stone
an armor unlike Pompeii’s porous pumice overcoat.
It will be centuries before we are found, and even then,
even in a world shaped by our mountain’s fame —
even then, you will not know our name.