Earthquake Türkiye-Syria
White ash ghost-masks two teenagers
live-streaming their ghoulish faces
from an underworld, slip-struck from dinner table,
Anatolian plates smashed by Arabian & Eurasian
One wrong breath gives Death a place setting
The older whispers, If you love God, save us
Another boy, his head pinned sidewards
beneath a slab that may be his bedroom wall
or someone’s pancaked floor whispers from
new-made gloom, I can’t move, my cell’s dying
Our sons, earth’s sons, so dear to us, dying
cell by cell in sudden-made cells of white dust
Al Jazeera’s news crawl reads: It cannot be
determined at this time if these have been saved
..
Earthquake Morocco, South of Marrakesh
I told my son to get a knife to cut the cake
He went into the kitchen The collapse,
it happened We stood on the seventh floor,
perched like pigeons over a black hole
He’s under there, do you hear? We got to the ground
All day we dig with bare hands We have no tools
..
Cyclone, Two Dam Breaks, Derna, Libya
Bombs, I thought, then bodies on me under me
A baby floating by in the slurry, my wet shift
stuck between my legs, nearly intact buildings
clink, whole trees drag all manner of things
I go under, pop up so many times I can only
describe to you flashes You won’t understand
Each time I speak I, too, lose what it was,
what was, cars and houses light as balsa
I woke curled on a shelf the raging flow had cut
Weighted with sludge, I rose, a statue of Uma,
the miracle, then flesh of my stomach told
me they were dead Why was I left alive, I cried
on that false promontory, the brown sea seemed
far away, keeping its distance, itself afraid of Derna
..
The Interrogation
Why am I not that ash-whitened boy, head stuck
in slab, whispering to widen the bandwidth for help
Why am I not that old woman who dies in the aftershock,
snow falling to whiten the insulting liquefaction of matter
Why am I not that boy who says, Baba, I’ll get the knife
Worse, the father who can never change sending his son
Why am I not the woman swept off in her sleep Why do
I not cry out, How can I live if they are dead
..
On the Beach in Derna
Young Abdullah with a rope around his boy’s waist,
his hair sea-salted, wildly curly, proffers an answer
to the reporter who asks how he copes, pulling out
bodies that only now have begun to wash back to shore
He squints as sun splints pirouette on a sea turned brown
We are god’s and to god we must return