The morgues are full.

I scratch my head and wonder what to do.

Whatever happens in Liverpool? –

a mugging last night on Renshaw Street,

we’re told;

the Echo launches a dangerous dogs campaign;

the Chief Executive said last night . . .

Oh, what the hell!  Whatever happens in Liverpool?

We didn’t get out of Haret Hreyk in time.

The American warplanes drilled the sky,

letting out their vacuum bombs.

Adilah sleeping beside me let out a sigh

above the ticking of the alarm,

and I noticed its luminous hands were at 3.05.

I turned in time for thermobarics

to do its work:

oxygen was pumped out in a long scream

followed by death.

The morgues are full.

Tonight we’ll be drinking wine: that’s fine –

a harmless pleasure to brighten time.

And after supper we’ll sit

in friendly silence

watching Channel 4 news.

Haret Hreyk is flattened.

Little but rubble and lamenting girders

offends horizontality.

Adilah’s right arm and luminous hand lie in their perfection

by an alarm clock

stopped at 3.05.

The morgues are full.

I sit here writing a poem

while cluster munitions shriek

through human flesh

and phosphorus turns it black.

It’s nearly supper time,

and I must uncork the wine.

We too died – fleeing Israeli shells

in Zaleh.  We were just passing through,

or so we thought, following a truck

loaded with sugar and rice for Beirut,

and Israeli-American jets bombed us:

screaming thud, lungs on fire, a long time dying.

Their spokesmen were to say

we were carrying weapons for Hezbollah,

but we were too dead to tell them the truth

and black as shoes.

The morgues are full.

Good business, I reflect, for Lockheed Martin:

Guérnica without a US air crew.

I savour the wine: a light Ancien Comté

with a hint of oak.

‘What time’s the news?’ I ask.