12/08/2023
What is my loss of one man, one “old” man, one love, against theirs, 17000 and counting, children, poets (he was a poet, too, a stage poet, a master minder of language and feeling, a shape-changer) academics, mothers, brother, sisters, doctors, nurses, you name it, dead in an instant, or trapped under the rubble, dying there, alone, hearing the cries of the others, muffled, going out like lights. What is my loss that has laid me low these many months since you died my beloved against the loss of so many, so many, so many and more to come on this day and the next day because there appears to no way to stop the rage, the revenge, the genocidal desire of the genocide survivors, who lost, also, lost beloveds. What is my loss that has lain me low all these months, my loss which means I have no one, no one, no one now who knows me as you used to know who I was and how many are left without, without the one who looked at them, who saw into, whose spirit brightened was made bright by you, now without. Looking emptily into space, into sorrow. And still the bombs fall, taking away who knows who and who knows which of the dead were special to those of the living, who gave life, that is, to those who remain alive, now dead inside, like I am, without, without forever, unable to comprehend, “it does not get better,” another of those who have been left alive said to me this morning. It does not get better, for how many thousands who have lost, will lose this day, or the next, lose one or the ones, lose and go on walking, go on walking somehow, alone, now, in the world, until the next bomb or the next bomb, or the one after the others, the one death after all the others, the one they could not bear to lose, that one, that special one dies in their arms. Their eyes turned dark forever.
