Speechless in the face of the Unspeakable

Faced with the enormity of atrocity and feeling useless, the blank page a rubble running with blood, it’s clear to me that I have been writing about this moment for fifty years. In one way or another, the long shadow of war, the threat of it, the terror of it, and the moral failure it represents and enacts, has been a subject of my writing across the books, across the genres. So what I’m proposing to do is post — daily, if I can — work I’ve already written that feels useful to the attempt to grasp this horrific moment. Today I begin this project with the poem “Just War” from my book Emblem, in 2011:

Just War

Your father killed my mother because

her brother shot your grandmother’s cousin

for raping his aunt to punish her father

who had swindled his brothers out of land

your great-great-grandmother believed

her father’s god had promised her so

what were you doing there worshipping

idols and threatening peace-loving farmers,

descendants of those who were marched

from their homes to wherever they fell

and curled into leathery question marks

that never go away although we try

to answer in the only way that we know how.

You want to know why? That’s why.