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| Image source: NY Times |
The sculptor of tombstones
cannot work quickly enough
to accommodate the war
going on around him
while the boy
discovered in a house’s rubble
is white as powdered marble
and crumbles in the arms
that try to raise him.
There aren’t a thousand words
to trade for the picture
of a man who lays his head
upon a dead friend’s chest,
or for that of the light
passing through a hole in the ceiling
the way a believer might imagine
a signal from God, but the floor
is broken plaster and the sky
keeps exploding. Against a wall of fire,
a man tries to run
faster than the bullets following him.
Two sections of a hospital room bed
have folded from their springs
at ninety degree angles
as if a patient heard again
the shots that had killed him
and suddenly sat up
to find his body vanished.
David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in1978. He pursued his visual art and had several shows as well as writing and publishing his poetry in magazines and collections, the latest of which is The Devil’s Sonata from FutureCycle Press.
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