i.m.

Hundreds and thousands line up by the sea

following last night’s bombings where again many have died

—it’s difficult to know what this means;

the sun hasn’t fully come up although the sky

which is never blue anymore and is now patched

with smoke, is bright. There is no breeze at the beach

and everyone takes in this humidity, as if a sentence has been passed;

everyone makes an effort to speculate, they say

why us?—which could mean a hundred different things:

why is it happening to the people we’ve so loved;

or almost everyone we ever knew

is now dead, why is it us that’s still denied the peace

of death? The only surviving family from near a bombsite

have said last night we saw men running with guns

making sure no one escaped—in the short-lived quiet of the night

they’d heard the gunmen shout at each-other let’s not waste

any bullets, eh? This family, they say they were spared

because they hid; that they weren’t

spared, only somehow missed; that their house

was perhaps marked as deserted; that we lived

alhamdulillah, by chance; that when they looked out

of the window, they say, that everywhere

there was a thing once, now it was only smoke, and ruin,

if anything; that the cool blue surface of water

lit up with every shot fired

—imagine, if you will, a sea imitating a thunderstorm