My ability to write in 2024 has been severely affected by a litany of things. I described this year to someone in the following words: “wonderful, terrible, fantastic, and tragic.” Over the last couple of years, and in 2024 in particular, I have lost some close family. All the losses have been sudden. The grief that has followed this has been compounded by the levels of global violence, uncertainty, and increasing fascism. I have also been burnt out and unwell. In addition to this, I have had many professional highlights. The resulting emotional and physical exhaustion has been difficult to put into words. I remind myself that I write poetry as a sort of therapeutic tool of catharsis. And so I wrote this in the middle of a night while trying to make sense of it all. For them and for us, I hope this verse helps…
I was probably sleeping the night the fire took you…
Breathe in. Breathe out. The motion tells us we are still alive.
I keep replaying what I did not see in my mind
It’s different every time.
Some times the night is still, when the violence starts.
At others, the night was already howling like a mother crying for her lost children.
The wind blows, the temperature high, the smell of dust rolls from the north, and then we hear staccato gunfire.
Breathe in. Breathe out. The motion tells us we are still alive.
I wanted to ask why you never told me that gunfire sounds so different when it is live action.
How smoke smells do not come through our screens.
Now there are so many questions I will never get to ask.
Breathe in. Breathe out. The motion tells us we are still alive.
Another sunrise. Another sunset. Another scene… playing through my mind—a technicolour memory of a movie I never watched.
How do we mourn what we will never understand?
How do we mourn on the battlefield?
How do we mourn when our home becomes the battlefield?
Mortar shells through the bathroom windows.
Everyday instruments become tools of our destruction.
Breathe in. Breathe out. The motion tells us we are still alive.
How do we still walk calmly laugh, go shopping, make chitchat?
How do we quiet the thunderous beating of our hearts?
The blood furiously, constantly rushing in our ears?
As we plan for tomorrow, next month, next year, in five years time?
Breathe in. Breathe out. The motion tells us we are still alive.
Our world has become a bloodbath.
Our world has always been a bloodbath.
Someone has always been eaten by fire, swallowed by water, consumed by chaos,
Left to destruction, abandoned to despair, sunk in a cycle of suffering.
While the world watches on. Sometimes cheering on, sometimes reaping from the harvest of blood.
Human vampires delight in blood, yet still walk in sunlight, spend their loot in daytime.
I breathe in. I breathe out. The motion tells me I am still alive. Somehow, still human.
I will never understand it.
I refuse to understand it.
We must never understand it.
Breathe in. Breathe out. The motion tells us we are still alive.
I breathe in. I breathe out. The motion tells me I am still alive. Somehow, still human.
Who will remember to mourn when time unravels?
Will the history books track our breathing, our grieving, our sorrow?
Or like always will history record only a litany of wins and success,
With no record of the dead, except in the earth that buried them, and the broken hearts that loved them?
Where is the place of love in our record of history?
Will there be time to mourn in earth’s uncertain future?
What does it mean to leave ourselves behind?
Why does victory require the death of all that makes us human?
I breathe in. I breathe out. The motion tells us I am still alive. Somehow, still human.
For now.
