By Hannah Larrabee
I felt alone the same day
Anthony Shadid died
on horseback, his clenched lungs
echoed now in the broken wombs
of cities
crumbled stone
bonework and ash
it is a faraway ache like a dream
think of how comfortably we move
into safer rooms of ourselves with
the stillness of monks set aflame
but we can’t step into a yard that is not ours,
not even here, among neighbors
listen, one violin is invoking the others
it lingers
living
voice of hair
& wood
and the others must respond
to something
so beautiful
they must all break
in unison
& they do
then we are here, in Syria
I open my mouth and no dust collects inside
I think of the summer night sky
boom of distant fireworks the smoke
backlit the climbing magnitude
what if those were bombs
I am that far from war
and no one will talk to me about this feeling:
the voices in the rubble, the ones that
eventually go silent
who acquires them
who moves to speak and instead cries
for help in the middle of a supermarket
stands shocked
in the immaculate aisles of despair
let yourself be that music let yourself die
as a rule, all energy already exists and can
only be displaced
Hannah Larrabee’s full-length collection, Wonder Tissue, won the 2018 Airlie Press Prize. Her chapbook Murmuration (Seven Kitchens Press) is part of the Robin Becker Series for LGBTQ poets. Hannah was selected by NASA, as a poet, to see the James Webb Space Telescope in person. Her JWST poems were displayed at Goddard Space Center. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire.
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