Friday Poem: "Oklahoma City Bombing: Reflections"

Oklahoma City Bombing:  Reflections

   “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?”

   --Rilke, “The First Duino Elegy”

  “I can see them with their angel’s wings,”

   --A mother who lost two children in the explosion (CNN)

         
                             l
New wounds bring old ones in their train
Reasons sour like debts too long unpaid
We feel the bite of teeth but see no face
Here in this place that is no place

                             2
Mean tasks are elevated in the blur of grief
Rubble becomes ritual without relief
If only these dead had been nameless
We’d need not seek them all

                              3
Their muddled futures will be built
Of counterfactuals ringed with guilt
And banality will join with bile
To wreathe catharsis for a while

                               4
No one ever understands death’s dance
Antietam Iwo Jima Ardennes Viet Nam
Grow younger as we die with them
What color is the enemy whose enemy are we

                                5
We survive as conscripts of remembrance
For knowing is accomplice to the crime
Old wounds spawn new ones in their line
The unthinkable keeps ticking all the time

                                 6
Let the children have their wings
Poor dead tiny blameless things
Why not place them near the angels:
Who will hear them if they weep

4/19-5/24, 12/2/95, 2/2-2/9/98, 3/1/98

Copyright 1995, 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.