The machine did it coldly, as if no human hand had hidden behind the order just merely placed, and these streets, these geraniums on a hand-tended windowsill are already the past in the machine’s cold eyes.
Can there be a pause in a war long enough to vaccinate children, to supposedly preserve life, but not long enough to end it— and stop ending lives?
The reader is disappointed. Bored, to hear the truth: Whose hands order a daughter’s wedding cake with Crane’s-bill decorating it could also order a young man into the mouth of winter’s bloody frost?
Tell him of the dripping of strategic red lines, of the grave’s remarkable uncovered simplicity.
Write, as your job in a damn journalist tone the presenter lines, who’ll, in a professionally cold voice, deliver to the quivering like wind-blown petals sea-fish covered with the net banded ones.
*Signe Gjessing, SECTION VI OF LE BATEAU IVRE
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cut and cauterized yet still the reader bleeds .. such excellent writing
This poem stayed with me because it never lets the human disappear behind systems, headlines, or machines. The question about pausing a war long enough to vaccinate children, but not long enough to end it, is devastating in its simplicity. I also admired the contrast between ordinary acts of care and the decisions that send lives into violence. A powerful meditation on responsibility, language, and what it means to remain human.