In a city bleached a pale shade of grey,
A girl, watches a man vomit up his life upon the
pavement. Broken. His body splayed within a crater
almost as fractured as the very moon itself.
Standing still, motionless, as quiet as the seconds
after death. She watches as the city she grew up
in, blazes on into the night, its reflection scorched
in her watered gaze.
She wondered then and there, if this walkway ahead
was really one beaconing behind,
if it were a merciless case of the past being almost
changeable, something to hold within the palms
of her burnt hands-
quickly! Run from the centre, don’t look back.
Do not allow yourself to be another body amongst the
flame.
But the way forward stretched out like a whistle;
like the hum of this man’s last words, ones she will always
regret never quite listening to.
Never quite grasping-
Saviour, let this be one of those memories,
the mind fails to remember.
Months after, she would attempt to write the water
out of the ocean. Her eyes brimming with a salt water
flood, eroding away the remains of her own
bombed cathedral, squirming, like a child newly born,
Screaming, like it was her first act of grace.
Yet still, all there is for memory to corrode is the sight
of the body whose chest shall never again rise
like a Phoenix from the ashes,
His voice, one that will
forever run towards her, glowing red as the embers of
burning wood and plaster, in that same
uncommitted way she sprinted towards her salvation.
One far from home. Drenched in a damned desert
of white.
She remembered the day her father
- or more the ghost of him -
Had clutched angrily at her wrists, the day she first
tasted the smell of decay, corpses buried beneath
and above her city walkways.
She had attempted to run from the screams booming
in the distance, unstoppable. The world, she had felt-
Or more the war – was all happening in slow motion.
But there, standing before a city blazing into non-existence,
She prayed the bombs would never reach a ground,
would just continue falling further until they were
close enough to being forgotten.
Look.
Her father said.
And she looked. Yet all there was to see was a
country, beginning the tactful act of drowning.
And a God, catching their souls, as they run from the
burning houses.
