A friend tells me she’s spent hours editing the war,
all the news, the views, streaming to her station,
trying to choose the images, the words
to bring this horror into our homes,
choosing clips to put in, leaving out parts.
Curating misery after unending misery.
How do you edit human misery?
Do you put in the men who start wars,
cut away from the mangle of machine and body parts
to show distraught hordes streaming to the stations?
Behind them, their lives, their loves, their homes.
And the rubble repeats their farewell words.
Their loss, their longing, their dying hopes become words
splintering the ice air. Stone cold misery
fills our screens, launched into our homes;
stories of families shattered by a criminal war.
These bombs and bullets are real, these are not PlayStation
games with heroes and villains playing parts.
Does she put in Putin’s puppets playing their part,
scoring points with cheap words?
Useful idiots, pundits cushioned in snug stations,
preening from podiums, mocking misery,
lickspittles salivating for war,
baying for blood from their sheltered homes.
Does she put in military mothers, waiting at home,
worrying about their sons, how they are part-
taking in a brutal butcher’s war;
wondering if their sons will forever bury the words
about the command to wreak misery
sanctioned by superiors in military stations
Do those commanders deploying troops to stations
tell young men why they are suddenly so far from home?
Do they stop to care about the shroud of misery
darkening the land they bombard, the parts
yet to be quelled as a dictator’s wishes and words
become wounds, as tanks, missiles, grind through days of war?
In the news station, my friend sits numbed. Which (body)parts
to send into our homes? A child’s hand curled? A mother’s dying words?
How can she redact the deadening, undying misery of war?
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Máire Fisher is a writer and writing mentor. She runs writing workshops in Cape Town. Her work has appeared in several anthologies and her novels, Birdseye (2014) and The Enumerations (2018) were published by Penguin Random House; soon to be published by Catalyst Press in America. She is working on her third, Bird on the Wire. She has recently acknowledged that she may well be a poet as well as a writer of prose.
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