Poem (I lived in the second century of world wars)

After Muriel Rukeyser

I lived in the second century of world wars.

Most mornings I would hide from the news

but it came for me through various devices:

assassins and bureaucrats, invasions and explosions

drones and stonings

the normalised mutilations of women

tucked between recipes for the thrifty

lipstick tips and children buried in the dust.

I would message my sisters

and we would offer up to one another our insanities

which were always the same insanities

which drove us more or less insane.

Slowly I would reopen my file of despair

holding Muriel in her brightening night

with all she tried to reconcile

and I would call upon myself to let go the means, to wake.

But I lived in the second century of these wars

from which there is no waking.

Jacqueline Saphra