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.