(Written after the bombing of the FederalBuilding
in Oklahoma City in 1995.)
Bombs, we called them,
In the innocent years ---
The old used cars
With back seats made for love.
Car bombs, we call them now,
Ambiguous panel trucks
That have no room for anything
But death.
Belfast. Beirut.
New York, softened by snow,
Oklahoma City,
On a brilliant spring morning.
Not tomorrow
Or even next month,
But sometime too soon
They will be forgotten.
Bulldozers will erase rubble,
Building empty lots.
New disasters in other places
Will encroach upon memory.
the idle threats of politicians
Dissolve into the rhetoric of law
To which nobody
Is accountable.
And in the middle of a land deemed holy,
Hawk-faced young men
Dabble in fertilizer and fuel oil,
Designing Armageddon.
It has begun already,
The forgetting.
Share
Print
Save
Follow
conceived and beautifully executed. Notably:
And in the middle of a land deemed holy,
Hawk-faced young men
Dabble in fertilizer and fuel oil,
Designing Armageddon.
-gene.