How can we mourn?

by Janet Sillett

how can we mourn a city
who are not its victims?
we do not hear the drones
or smell decay
we do not feel the shaking of foundations

our eulogy a distortion stretched threadbare
gaslighting humanity

“Don’t scroll past”

but I do now, often, nearly twelve months on
a child swaddled by his father in blood rags
a tiny girl dancing

seven, eight years old
I find a book with images of a death camp after liberation
stacked corpses blood gathering on the dirt floor
ungendered unnamed a child’s shoe crushed by bones

images
pinned in my head
my birthright

scars of memory
like those on my back
embedded

how can I mourn a city
when it is impossible to shut out the clamour of genocide

old men in the library
in shorts and white socks
dull sandals
waiting for their wives in print dresses

shop windows
colour refracted in glass
splintered

wisteria around the graveyard in its second bloom of summer
a shadow of its earlier birth

today silence may drown the cacophony