Yesterday I wrote a poem about the death of a child, and the death of humanity, then I wrote a poem about the death of poetry, the last, an intensely personal death. Or perhaps that is hyperbole. Instead, something inexplicable; a deep wound in the spirit. I know, these are fanciful, abstracted terms, and we want in writing about life something that anchors us (us the readers) in the experience that is being shared. In this case, however raw, however artificed, my experience writing the poem is a feeble gauze in comparison to that other life, that mangled life, and the desperate agony of the need to redeem something –failed in the face, the heel, the hammer of brute extermination. Here is the first poem. It is fairly self-explanatory.
Dead Child on the ABC’s X Feed
I watched them cut the fabric away
embroidery stiff as half-dried sap
saw the beads spill like sand
all the colours of hope
pouring away with a red-flared hiss
face still as dirty wax
a doll, someone wrote, and laughed
that cut throat
soundless laugh
in the cavern beneath their breath
lips doll still
a groan inside their chest
Now here’s the thing. I held the iPad, that monstrous eye of cobalt and aluminium and sapphire glass, in wrists aching from nothing more than age and weariness, and felt the ache in that doctor’s wrists, and I shook, and looked; and looked away, and wrote a poem on this hard machine, and thought if this child is dead why should this poem have its feeble, half-realised life? Looking again, someone had written Pallywood in the – for want of a better word – conversation. And written doll. And all I could imagine in that moment was the agony, the emptiness, the pain in that person’s chest, and it seemed to me the death of the child under Israel’s bombardment had lodged in their heart no less than mine, and the hollow space that could so easily invoke this vile dehumanisation harboured an even uglier death. A living death; weak, frightened and indefensible, and I suppose, I forgave them.
Not long after, I saw gripped in hands fierce and desperate as knot wood, another child, grey with dust and loss, head torn open, and wrote another poem, and could not forgive myself.
Infanticide
Wrote a poem the shape
of her torn open fontanelle
realised
there is a point
where all poetry stops
