tomorrow

tomorrow

i will read the newspaper

thousands dead, the earth shivering

there is no way to save them

 

but for a few.  tomorrow and

the next few days tens of thousands

perish beneath the failure of humans

to care enough to build properly

and the ones still living

 

will need a target for blame

all the dead people lips periwinkle blue

hands gone cold as frozen meat

all the grieving ones the suffering

animals the weary survivors

 

and then, a newborn

pulled from rubble and bent rebar

still wearing her umbilical cord

and we know one tiny miracle

is salvation for the watchers

 

who hear her dusty voice on the news,

the cry heard everywhere we can listen.

 

j. pratt-walter  © 2/22/23

 

Inadequate

 Two lives, fragile

as spiderwebs, light

as dawn’s birdsong

are yanked away with a bomb back

into Mystery.

Crushed pelvis, they said, hip

pulled off its moorage,

 

where the skull of an

almost-born engaged in life’s

potential met the same finish

as that pelvis…a word

better made for berries

pressed into syrup, for grapes

dreaming of wine: crushed.

 

What is lost matters

between two failing pulse-beats,

among disconnected

 

bones,

where ditches of blood

lay open to places sanguinity

should never go,

 

where no poetry is even

slightly

adequate leaking from

my lapsed pen or along

the drowning corners of my eyes.

 

J. Pratt-Walter ©2022

This is about the Ukrainian pregnant woman from a bombed hospital.

First the baby, then the mother died.  Inspired by an AP shot seen round the world.