October 2024
Change of the seasons, woke up cold.
Time to pile on extra blankets.
Thought of the people living in rubble,
huddling under whatever scrap of comfort
they can pull around their bones—sick,
hungry, broken, families blown away,
entire bloodlines erased. With no plan
to rebuild, it could take generations.
How to face such a dawn knowing children,
grandchildren, great-grandchildren pre-condemned?
Nor to forget among the tens or hundreds
of thousands dead those double hostages
of Hamas and Bibi. God help us all.
Woke this morning, cold from a year of war.
Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.