EVEN AS WE SLEEP

by Zara Raab

Disaster: the charred shell of Grenfell Tower a month after a fire in the building claimed 80 lives Getty Images via The Standard, July 27, 2017

To keep tenants warm
or impress rich neighbors,
builders wrap a London tower
in sheets of shiny tin,
and post notices that warn:
“Stay inside in case of fire,
and close your doors.”

Whisked up twenty floors
fire came this hour from outside in,
for the London tower is higher
(twenty stories to the roof)
than the fire man’s tallest ladder,
and the cladding, no proof
against Armageddon.


*

Pakistani residents carry an injured man after twin blasts at a market in Parachinar. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images —The Guardian, June 23, 2017

Every river, its sault.
Where you gather on market
days, or pray in temple pew,
you couldn’t be the target
of doom, but come, still, to bombs
like all unwelcome fate, hidden,
one of many, lit back-to-back

in towns like Parachinar; a photo
of ruined streets will show
just what can happen,
you’ll see, just watch the news.
So too in Baluchistan--
the crucible of guns--in Orlando,
Cincinnati or Syracuse.

*

The damaged USS Fitzgerald sits in dry dock in Yokosuka Photograph: Spc. 1st Class Leonard Adams/AP via The Guardian, July 22, 2017

Once an old oak held a platform
in its gnarly arms
where we children played.
With gumption, we added a wall
or two with our kit of tools,
but spiders soon swarmed by the dozen
to spin, and drove us away.

What comes even as we sleep?
On auto pilot, one big ship
rams another, midnight. As men
sleep in their bunks, the sea pours in,
flooding the sealed rooms where,
un-waking, un-watchful, they’ll be, later,
when we count the drowned.

Zara Raab's books are Fracas & Asylum, Swimming the Eel, Rumpelstiltskin, or What’s in a Name? and The Book of Gretel, narrative poems of Northern California. Her work, including reviews and essays, as well as poems, has appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Verse Daily, River Styx, Arts & Letters, Crab Orchard Review, Raven Chronicles, and The Dark Horse. She lives in western Massachusetts.

ON SHATTUCK AVENUE

by Zara Raab

Image source: The Monthly

the old homeless men say nothing
these winter nights in the city.
For months they go without speaking,
instead endlessly wandering
as if the stream of love
had stopped,
leaving only boundless pity.

Arms outspread, “Friend!” we croon to them,
when a word said simply would do
so much more to dispel a gloom.
They can’t turn off too soon
from so grand a gesture,
well meant to reassure––
hot food and warm beds––a future.

Are you ever trapped in logic
as I am—caught as if in amber––
willing to act, but no matter
where you aim, missing your target,
unable to stop
or become someone else,
your need for change urgent?

A kind word said simply would do
so much more to dispel a gloom,
an hour in our human houses
feeling out each of many rooms,
their echoes and uses.
We cannot start too soon.
The shelter we seek is human.


Zara Raab’s latest books are Fracas & Asylum and Rumpelstiltskin, finalist for the Dana Award. Earlier books, Swimming the Eel and The Book of Gretel, evoke the rainy darkness of the remote North Coast. Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in Poetry Flash, Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, The Dark Horse, and Poet Lore. She is a contributing editor to the Redwood Coast Review and Poetry Flash.