gone
after Joshuah Lim
of the reign of a blackened sun, red beams
coarse across mottled land, stained by the
pulse of two seas, Eastern and Aegean, how
spear-heads find their way to the soft of
the neck, or the bayonets caress the flesh
beneath the chin, the quiet singe of a
rifle head wafting to the wetness of
hot tears. for here and there we hear the
wailing echoes rhyme, bursting across the
thatched rooves, the stone entrances,
bodies lain for twisted hunger, shackled
by waiting, in tents for self-declaimed
masters. Hecuba speaks of how she
shall never stop crying, each peal of
sorrow stripped from an image engulfed:
mudbrick fortresses, beaming children, a
husband’s embrace, wiped by the ash
sputtering in orange and grey. her body
bears the ache of ruin, the temples that
throb, the ribs that burn, the spine that
yearns to switch and turn, agonised in
contortion. bawling, the only utterance
of music. and Lee Halmoni feels the
songs perish in her flesh, feels the keloids
quiver across her side, her stomach, the
lump of her throat and her chest, insoluble
before the years of acrid shame, burning
down the throat, swallowed by dusk. the
way she could not look her lover in his
eyes, afraid they would unravel the looping
knot of thirty years: the quivering ruin
of one, ten, forty, pumps of filth in the
languishing heat of far away, where no ballads
would ever find their meaning, no light would
bring its cleanness. how they huddled, knee to
chin, too ready to efface, withdraw until the
boots would no longer find their gravel, the
stars would stay on their shoulders, the hope
of a blurring face would be enough to endure
another day. how they cut their hair for Korea
and Troy, slashed and mourned beside old
tombs, wishing they could expunge the sights
of slaughter, ripped from the hands of another,
rags on tattered bodies and knees in desperate
plea, burying each grief beneath bare ground,
wondering if every other taken woman too
had learned to hold her fists, nails digging
until her palms began to break, teeth began
to crack, tears began to turn sand to mud.
would they live to see their footnotes beneath
the lines of fanatical men, their roars vanishing
in the force of the horizon, as elusive as a single
prostrate figure? carve their suffering into stone,
etched in paper and pixel, and see how their faces are
encased in bronze.
where a lick of flame must fall,
lashing across an old paper
theatre, ashen against the old
balm of forest and clay, smoke
against the lines of a wizened
face, where the tongues that
once felt for the divine fade
into the soil, and the altars of
bent worship vanish in a block
of concrete. there too is the
waning pulse of twenty years,
swallowed in the glint of glass
and electric ripples, held back
by the angular homes along a
hill, doused in fearsome grey,
lavender, unuttered prayers
dotting the time beneath the
tarmac, the clamor and rush
to speak to new gods.