8.4.08

no spoon to hold...

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Naomi Replansky

Epitaph 1945


My spoon was lifted when the bomb came down
That left no face, no hand, no spoon to hold.
A hundred thousand died in my home town.
This came to pass before my soup was cold.

*

A fragment of such a dark moment in history. Somehow guilt, regret, and angst never leave us. We think war is about ideology, about ownership, about politics, power. But, it’s really about food, about innocence, shock, about the disappearance of the day to day.

2 comments:

Sky said...

and when we think about how americans reacted to september 11th, we might assume that none of us would support a war where other people face those dark moments, when the routine day changes suddenly into a nightmare from which no one is quite sure how to extricate himself. unfortunately, that is not true. :((

sam of the ten thousand things said...

It's not true - That's right. What I think history proves is that we never learn what we need to learn. Thanks for the visit & comment, Sky.