Poem: Explosions

 by Dawn Sands

Explosions

for Palestine, 4th November 2023

You are buried, all four foot five of you interred

under a twenty foot pile of rubble, skin

caked in mud and blood and rib cage crushed

by the weight of your own home on top of you

and I am here writing poetry about it. If you had a pen to write with

and a sheet of paper that didn’t burn with you

what would you say? Would you dream of a before 

or hope for the after or would you write about 

the bombs as they fell, how they blinded you with light

but not in the way God does? Would you write 

as we do about the problems you wish you had, 

would you write about the beauty we reject, rain glimmering 

on pavements in evening light as we hurry home longing 

for a bath and a few hours’ peace to paint the walls?

Your walls are crumbling, they launch their real

bombs into the air and we look at our real

television screens and don’t scream. Maybe once this is over

they will write stories about hope but for now we light our candles

and try to believe that they will rival the explosions 

that brought down your city. Tomorrow we will set off fireworks

and watch the coloured smoke dissipate into the dark,

and you’ll be somewhere in there but we can’t quite pinpoint 

where so we’ll ignore it. Or maybe

you’ll be looking down too from your seat in the sky

and thinking this, this is what explosions are for,

writing your name in the air with a sparkler  for eternity, name in lights, name in the night.