I read about a bomber whose favorite fruit was dates.
Somewhere, in the annihilating light and the no-time-to-cries,
amid the sudden silica of the market stalls,
the whirlwinded bones and the misted viscera: dates.
A brother said he’d loved them. Said it, I imagine,
with the same lonely catatonia of the saint
when God withdraws, and then withdraws His withdrawal,
until there’s nothing but a word for what had been a world.
Someone picked up the pieces. Someone scrubbed the blood.
Someone clung to something human, and someone wrote it down.