Rewind

It’s 9/11 the first time you stay.

In the morning you bring Taliban poems back to bed.

I drink cardamom coffee and you read their tender lines

‘May you not be hungry in the desert, my dear’.

Their loving as ordinary as ours.

I see wilding men shouldering RPGs by the swimming pool

of a warlord’s compound and think they’re beautiful,

watch a dentist fall to Earth from an aeroplane undercarriage

rising over Kabul.

Human payload slipping from the landing gear,

falling through swipes, scrolls and clicks.

Rewind the tapes, see the little man flying upwards,

returning to his life,

rewind the tapes.

Like Bruegel’s Icarus, he touches down with a splash

in a rooftop water tank 4km away,

his suffering unnoticed

except for a casual cell phone recording.

Twenty years ago, the twin towers man fell too,

twisting and turning, tie fluttering,

past flames and smoke, for a moment head first over Manhattan.

Rewind the tapes, see the little men flying upwards,

returning to their lives,

rewind the tapes.

We lie under a marigold-embroidered bedspread

bought in Afghanistan.

I’m afraid of you,

not you exactly, but of falling for you.

My old friend Tom took me on that shopping trip

in an armoured vehicle with his bodyguard

and I remembered the summer before the end of uni,

how he and I sat up late, drinking Jameson,

listening to Johnny Cash

and imagining our own deaths,

together, somewhere in a dusty alley,

all golden light, slow motion and elevated camera angles.

We took it in turns who was doing the dying

and who was doing the cradling.

Source: One Language (The Poetry Business, 2022)