by Gilbert Allen
with apologies to Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a war—
European or wherever—on the tube
that, for a decade, hasn’t had a tube.
We need less breaking and more mending news.
Picture old Movietones run in reverse
where buildings reassemble magically,
crushed bodies levitating from debris,
the bullet a blunt needle stitching flesh,
a mushroom cloud intact Hiroshima
at dawn. And no, I’m not an advocate
for Happy News—feel-good finales that
follow the last commercial with a Fido
wagging his tail from Kharkiv to Lviv
after his westbound owners couldn’t find him
or the insouciant Persian seraphim
purring beneath Mariupol's rubble.
No, what I want is just a world made whole
after each so-called surgical attack.
That would be good both going and coming back
for all us sorry old stone savages.
Gilbert Allen lives and writes in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. His most recent collection of poems is Believing in Two Bodies.