Mariupol burned room by room. Somewhere a mother pressed her child’s face against her coat, as if fabric could stop what was coming. In Gaza, the rubble arithmetic: a shoe, a schoolbook, a ceiling fan unmoored from the ceiling it once cooled. The living count the dead until counting breaks them. Beirut again. And then again. There’s a kind of city that knows how to be destroyed, has practiced it, wears the knowing in its cracked facades. Tehran’s daughters cut their hair in the streets and the hair fell like an argument no government could answer, only arrest. What do we do with so many names? Write them. Say them aloud. Watch how the mouth moves around syllables that used to mean a person. There’s no sentinel standing at the edge of this. No beacon. The dark doesn’t work that way; it doesn’t wait for light to oppose it. It just sits there, patient, full. And still someone plants tomatoes in the rubble-yard. Still a child in Kyiv draws a horse with four good legs, running. Not hope, exactly. Something rawer. The body’s refusal to stop wanting what it wants.
Author’s Note
Some poems begin as arguments and end as griefs. Battlefields started years ago as a broader plea; the kind you write when the scale of suffering feels too vast to name. But vastness can be its own evasion (my self-imposed distance from the reality of it all).
Returning to the poem, I couldn’t justify the abstractions anymore. Not with Mariupol. Not with Gaza, Beirut, Tehran’s streets full of women who decided their hair was worth the risk. The poem needed to stand inside specific rubble, not above it.
What survived the rewrite was my original impulse: the refusal to look away. What changed was the understanding that witness requires particulars. A shoe. A schoolbook. A child’s drawing of a horse with four good legs.
I don’t know what to do with that. I’m not sure poetry does either. But it keeps asking.
Upcoming…
A poem about carving out space:
JOY CONTAINER, 27 June 2026
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