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CULTURAL STRATUM   remember how once in a past life so long ago you would wake up and casually listen to the news now that seems unbelievable just like thinking about bucha or irpin you can’t picture those parks full of pine trees around sanatoriums and old estates you see only blown-up bridges gutted houses streets densely covered in the shards of people’s lives isn’t that what the archaeologists call a cultural stratum? skin stripped from a living epoch laid out on the earth, a bloody rag before this epoch began we  listened absentmindedly to the news and lived in cities with drama theatres in parks full of pine trees we were naive and beautiful we didn’t have to get excited about the single cabbage we hunted down in the empty supermarket we were like children brushing our teeth in the morning we would learn the names of places aleppo sanaa mekelle  where the epoch, skinned alive, lay in convulsions, its skin cast aside soaking the ground in blood waiting for future archaeologists but we would always forget those names we would finish brushing our teeth we’d put on our new trainers and grab a coffee in the kiosk go down into the metro without having to pick our way through people sleeping on the platforms we were creatures made of a different sort of material softer and pinker we would explain to our children what war is the way you might explain what the south pole or the planet mars are and not like you might explain why you can’t stick your fingers in the electric socket or climb onto the windowsill when the window is open we didn’t even know in that past life so long ago how many steel centimetres of pain can be plunged so easily into our soft, pink bodies     21 March 2022         A BIRD   all day I walk around keeping your name under my tongue   afraid to say it aloud lest   it escape and fly away   over the city in which for twenty days now nobody turns on the lights at night   between the stars and comets and artillery shells whose trajectories, in truth, are unknowable    a small bird with a great red voice   a small bird with a bitter seed of sorrow in its beak   but if it were to drop the seed by accident then even from this mutilated ground   it will grow into a great tree of love     16 March