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.

 

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