How can we mourn?
by Janet Sillett
how can we mourn a city
who are not its victims?
we do not hear the drones
or smell decay
we do not feel the shaking of foundations
our eulogy a distortion stretched threadbare
gaslighting humanity
“Don’t scroll past”
but I do now, often, nearly twelve months on
a child swaddled by his father in blood rags
a tiny girl dancing
seven, eight years old
I find a book with images of a death camp after liberation
stacked corpses blood gathering on the dirt floor
ungendered unnamed a child’s shoe crushed by bones
images
pinned in my head
my birthright
scars of memory
like those on my back
embedded
how can I mourn a city
when it is impossible to shut out the clamour of genocide
old men in the library
in shorts and white socks
dull sandals
waiting for their wives in print dresses
shop windows
colour refracted in glass
splintered
wisteria around the graveyard in its second bloom of summer
a shadow of its earlier birth
today silence may drown the cacophony
