Six years ago yesterday, I wrote a poem, bitter
As Stephen Crane’s heart, about the children of Homs,
About all human children and the terrible gift
For cooperation that coordinates our wars.
Yesterday, I woke to a report from the BBC,
A velvety voiced announcement stating aid
Convoys into another besieged Syrian city,
Or the remains of what had once been a city,
Were once again delayed. The same war,
Six years later, uninterrupted, still in the news,
Still pinioning victims or scattering them to the world.
It’s not just the capacity for death that stuns.
It’s that capacity to draw it out into torture,
Inherent not only in warfare, but in all cancers.
It’s how bodies, families, villages, civilizations
Must so often be exhausted, shredded, dragged
Through intricate alleyways of ambushes
And partial recoveries before finally allowed to end.
Or maybe I’m just exhausted myself. The war,
A long, grinding roar from the far side of my world
That has troubled news and political views,
That threatens a greater Armageddon any day
But not in my neighborhoods in any obvious way,
Continues. I have heard too much, read too
Much for my own or anyone’s good. I know
For how many centuries wars have trawled
Their chainmail dragnets across the deserts
Of increasingly barren Syria. Dozens. Dozens.
I know a heart of art and architecture, of faith
And literature beat the blood across those rocks.
Gardens and trees of knowledge started somewhere
Near there, I know. I know. I know I should
Pull myself together, stop blaming cooperation
For murder. I lie in bed alone, a bag of bones,
Weary of quoting others’ and my own poems.
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