Who Can Justify This?

 Who Can Justify This?

 

Kids carrying kids out of the rubble

of a bombed building is the brutal image

of tenderness we need and don’t need to see.

 

All images gather into deluges of images,

even if it’s a dry flattened landscape. Image piled

on image — the rubble of figurative language.

 

The kid carrying the kid out of the rubble:

quickening heart synched with faltering

heart, entangled in the materials of building.

 

The ‘justification’ behind the attack

leaves kids carrying kids out of the rubble.

The constructions of war; the idiom

 

for kids carrying kids out of the rubble

            of bombed buildings.

 

 

 

            John Kinsella