And then, I think about war

Trees no longer holding their arms up to heaven
�block the road, intersecting the wrong planes.
�The rain does not wash, but slices wind-driven knives
�into everything permeable. The dark, a heavy cloak, wires,
�lifeless serpents slithering through the rubble. Some of this

�

gets fixed. Too little, too slowly. We protest. We are tired of
�no refrigerator, no stove, no light to switch on; the house feels
�dead. Ninety days. Some days, the sun rises, the moon shines,
�water flows. Relief. Almost normal. But then it crashes again,
�the balloon of normalcy. The lights are gone, the house
�newly dead.

�

We are tired of this. The disaster.
�It repeats itself. Each time,
�the panic comes a little faster,
�we sink deeper into it.
�Trauma, stress, syndrome.
�I think I am learning to understand.

�

And then, I think about war.

�

About how there will be no blue tarps for the houses,
�no one to complain to
�about the broken everything, how the stink is not just
�the uncollected garbage,
�but the unburied, unburiable dead.

�

All these years I thought I knew. We protested.
�We chanted: Not in our name. But
�we were far away,
�or it was far away,
�the war we were making, the roofless dark
�where no life could hide.
�The nights rolled one into another
�the terror spread, oil on waters lit by flame after flame.
�Some lose limbs and some lose life and
�each time the panic comes faster, strikes deeper and
�we thought we knew,
�but we were far away, chanting
�Not in our name.

�

�