by Tom Bauer
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| A residential building destroyed by Russian shelling in Borodyanka, Ukraine. Photograph: Maksim Levin/Reuters |
That many days since they went marching in.
A hundred turns of horror and eyeballs
peeled back and fixed upon the safe truisms:
that this is what it is and this is wrong.
Emotions are the rulers here, not horror.
Are we urged to cry for the babes in earth,
unseen and unsung, dispatched with certitude
to certain doom for good truisms we love?
I’m like a gumshoe, just want the facts, ma’am.
No need to tell me who is right or wrong,
trying to convince me you know the real truth.
Who speaks true when murder is the argument
to prove the virtue of the cause? I can’t
see past the fact the top guys are getting paid.
Tom Bauer grew up playing violin and listening to spoken word recordings. When he was ten, he rashly announced he was going to be a poet. He did a bunch of university and stuff. He's had some poems published. He lives in Montreal and plays board games.