Unexploded Shells

There are still unexploded shells in the Somme

After a hundred years

Arrowheads litter the plains

And radiation the stratosphere

I've been thinking of late about the way

My ticking heart is wired

The way it's mined

With memory and throbbing pulsing pangs

There are 246 square miles

Of Croatian mine-suspected territory

And somewhere in BogotaKatmanduZimbabwe

A boy with a leg that ends at the knee.

There is a web of broken window glass

Stretching across this revolutioned city.

It lies just under the skin,

In eyes that don't trust

Eyes that know what mobs are made of.

Fault lines lie along the palms of hands

That shake, but are not shaking

Gashes open in the earth

Along the lines of skin and nation

The kettle's on again.

And when the whistle blows: bombardment.

The world flat-spins and

And we'll carve each other up

Like precision drones or yellowjackets,

Whittling bones again.

We fracture into you and I

As the flak of words makes a burning sky

The firebombs hit the shells and

Powder packed storehouses

Of every argument gone by.

No good scout between us left to fix

The knots untied,

The fires rise.

And the Khmer Rouge blooded bones

Sit in the fields unburied

And holding you opens the scabs

Of everything I've carried.

To live we must remember.

To live we must forget.