Morning News

Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread

and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches,

repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war.

A cinder-block wall shared by two houses

is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen

sink and a cupboard, on the other was

a bed, a bookshelf, three framed photographs.

Glass is shattered across the photographs;

two half-circles of hardened pocket bread

sit on the cupboard. There provisionally was

shelter, a plastic truck under the branches

of a fig tree. A knife flashed in the kitchen,

merely dicing garlic. Engines of war

move inexorably toward certain houses

while citizens sit safe in other houses

reading the newspaper, whose photographs

make sanitized excuses for the war.

There are innumerable kinds of bread

brought up from bakeries, baked in the kitchen:

the date, the latitude, tell which one was

dropped by a child beneath the bloodied branches.

The uncontrolled and multifurcate branches

of possibility infiltrate houses’

walls, windowframes, ceilings. Where there was

a tower, a town: ash and burnt wires, a graph

on a distant computer screen. Elsewhere, a kitchen

table’s setting gapes, where children bred

to branch into new lives were culled for war.

Who wore this starched smocked cotton dress? Who wore

this jersey blazoned for the local branch

of the district soccer team? Who left this black bread

and this flat gold bread in their abandoned houses?

Whose father begged for mercy in the kitchen?

Whose memory will frame the photograph

and use the memory for what it was

never meant for by this girl, that old man, who was

caught on a ball field, near a window: war,

exhorted through the grief a photograph

revives. (Or was the team a covert branch

of a banned group; were maps drawn in the kitchen,

a bomb thrust in a hollowed loaf of bread?)

What did the old men pray for in their houses

of prayer, the teachers teach in schoolhouses

between blackouts and blasts, when each word was

flensed by new censure, books exchanged for bread,

both hostage to the happenstance of war?

Sometimes the only schoolroom is a kitchen.

Outside the window, black strokes on a graph

of broken glass, birds line up on bare branches.

“This letter curves, this one spreads its branches

like friends holding hands outside their houses.”

Was the lesson stopped by gunfire? Was

there panic, silence? Does a torn photograph

still gather children in the teacher’s kitchen?

Are they there meticulously learning war-

time lessons with the signs for house, book, bread?

Source: Desesperanto (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2003)