Imagine just one bomb hitting your house. Just one, one time breaking the roof and part of the wall and it’s so loud you can’t even understand it and the whole place shakes so suddenly you fall off chair or bed or feet and if you’re close to the bombed part you fall almost out of the house because a huge chunk of your house is just gone, suddenly, everything you were keeping in it, whether pantry or kitchen or bedroom or library - that chunk of your life is ripped away, and if you are very lucky then no family members are killed or trapped underneath. If you are lucky you can still run and head south where they told you to go never mind what is south just go along with everyone else running away from home, from everything you made and kept and loved because it’s better than being bombed and at what point did this become impossible to imagine over here where I live and is this what we mean when we say unimaginable horror, or is it a way of refusing to imagine what has become an undeniable daily reality over there where you live, and we haven’t even talked yet about body parts and blood…
~ ~ ~
And here where we can only imagine
what is the arrangement of things
that is right?
Where is the repository for devotion
‘the sustained one note of obligatory
hope’
Which gestures can we make with
arms and hands, what facial posture
will hold this fear that is so
physically distant yet right with us
now as a threat how to say
that which is not mine is mine
that pain horror
excruciating hope
is with me too
as a person in a body
vulnerable to fire, smoke, sharp
objects flung
as if at random
When you are bombed
it shakes the ground here
that we thought we could stand on,
that ground — ruptured
when you are bombed we are all
rendered more susceptible
to bombing
~ ~ ~
I stumble
on the nominally
level ground
of this life
because where how
a child is no child
the transubstantiation
of human into target
into debris that must be cleared
to realize a bleaching,
poisoned dream
If this is dream and hope to some
then how where why
human likeness
this presence of body mind thought
impossible
that we can share
if you will cover a child
in dirt and rubble in order to say
your child will live in so called
freedom?
my throat dries
my fingers crack
this pen is heavy
words are not
what I thought
heart shocked to stillness
[citation from Jorie Graham, the rest written by me (© Tracy Hudson 2024)]