“Among the most sinister phenomena in intellectual
history is the avoidance of the concrete.”
Elias Canetti
Twenty four people killed in the air strike:
Four with gaping wounds
On the stomach,
Their bloody entrails obscenely
Out of the skin pouch;
Three with shattered heads,
Like crushed watermelons,
Or trampled apples;
Faces with eyes gouged out, lips split,
And noses shattered;
Heads without bodies, bodies without heads;
Torsos without limbs, limbs without torsos;
Fingers knocked off the hands;
Shapeless pieces of burnt flesh;
Blood joining blood on a communal pool,
On the grassless soil;
Broken houses with charred walls,
And burnt rooftops;
A ruined landscape peopled with the dead,
The wounded and shattered souls.
Doesn`t such verbiage take up,
So much space, and consume so much air-time,
And even tire the truthful tongues,
Of the statesmen?
Will the dead ever object to a simple phrase,
Serving as a synopsis of such carnage,
Saving so many,
So much?
