Let Me Explain
By Shook
after Neruda
Go ahead, ask: where are
the pomegranates, the dates,
the girls with skin brown as hash,
the hash?
Listen to what’s happening
One morning bonfires
began to leap from the earth,
devouring human beings,
lit by matches flicked across
the sky with joysticks.
And from then on fire,
from then on burning hair,
from then on limbs and meat.
Invisible bandits, pickpockets
from ten-thousand feet,
faceless, thoughtless, dumb
except for humming,
bandits marked with tiny flags,
controlled from continents away
by children, child bandits
with letter jackets left hanging
in their girlfriends' closets,
child bandits with bibles
thumbed and highlighted,
spear missiles through the sky to kill other children
and the blood of children runs through the streets,
neither seen nor heard, obedient,
simply, like children's blood.
Ask away: why doesn’t his poetry
describe our urban loneliness,
the body drenched in metaphor?
There’s nothing to see here,
nothing to see,
just blood in the sand,
blood in the streets,
nothing to see.
Copyright Credit: David Shook, "Let Me Explain." Copyright © 2018 David Shook. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and the WFMT Radio Network.
Source: PoetryNow (2018)