The Birds of Sarajevo

Sunday morning we heard more war
in the distance, and soon
the rain was falling like slag
murdering the crocuses.

This from my friend
n her elegant hand.

Her words pull
across the page and down,
a single sinew
weighted at its end…

The news Sunday morning
was a language ancient
as stones and fire, constituents
of the everyday.

But we are, if nothing else,
inventive when it comes to finding
an hour for making love; chaos spoils
otherwise.  We loved as usual.

On her visits here to the staggering calm
of Canada, we will push our work papers aside
and replenish our glasses with the Balkans;
speak of how strange
love's fragile mouth like a river mouth
can still open inside war
to the taste of the sea.

Our roof was quiet above us
on Sunday as we curved, one
inside the other, in our warm
afternoon attic.

Cont'd…

Then a thrashing rain decended;
it was just past noon.

Out our window
someone cried
         “A child has fallen!”
Shot like a bird
from a courtyard birch,
a sprig of buds bleeding
in her hand.

And here—See her words
press, a backward slant
into the thin blue pulp,
like nails curled back
into their own flesh.

Our neighbour's child.
Rain sinking into the mud around her
like tiny missiles;
and that damned tree still standing
Grotesquely beginning its year.

Another child, just a line
in the poetry of our mad warriors.

We loved as usual; the rain
has stopped for now.

Published in Grain Magazine, 2003