Poem for Alaa Abd Al-Neizi

 


What could I tell you about

War? All the reaching after

Metaphors, yoking a bomb strike

Into likeness with a splinter. Yours 

Is the graver palette. Hail of drone

Fire, an earth swallowing its earth. 

I will never know you. I will tell

You once I thought art should only be

About beauty. It is only

About loss, though, isn’t it?  

Eulogies meant to demarcate deaths

Humming prone instead like nurse

Logs, all life & vibrancy pushing

Through thin skeins of toppled soil. 

Tender root in rotted wood.

My own children dance in the wind 

With a purple umbrella. It lifts. It falls.

Inside, I watch

Their mouths move, their lips shape

Smile & song. They are mammals

Skittering across the grass & to watch

Them is to converse with the bright sliver of 

My own childness. You would have

Loved them. They are free. Where

Are you celebrated? Where are you?

I want to say I’m sorry. The monsters 

Are out from under the bed. The monsters 

Bullied away the pens to sign the scripts

To send the planes to drop the bombs

To dispossess you of you. Us of you.

To take you in bycatch. What 

Can I tell you about living? The cold

Ground underfoot in the morning, robin song,

The breathing water. What we see becomes

What we are, & in it, iteratively but yet

With wonder, reasons to long & to ache

To be here. To lose, having loved.

It is shale grey this morning

& gravid with rain. I am alive & I

Will sing your name. 








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