Meanings
Collateral damage. Shock and Awe.
Where are the meanings that we had before?
Gives language a bad name does war.
Shock was his shaggy mane of hair ‘til now –
a dozen corn sheaves stacked together
in a field. Something you ‘got a bit of’, – how
did it come to mean this nightly slaughter –
every tooth in the city shaken?
And awe? Crouched under amputations
Of falling glass – do they wonder
at those sublime illuminations
that rip homes and schools from under
them when ‘targets’ are mistaken?
Collateral – now there’s a word misspent.
No longer money pledged against a loan,
but children burned alive in the bent
wreckage of a car. A hand blown
from a wrist. Splashed brains. Backs broken.
Collateral damage. Shock and Awe.
Where are the meanings that we had before?
Gives language a bad name does war.