Not upon a vasty field

upon rereading “Henry V” March 2026

The air is heavy with war; clouds
cannot hide the fires of a girls’ school in dust.
The ancient crawl again finds itself:
humanity, its mouth caked in burning sand.

Bodies pinned under concrete,
broken in every future. We cannot, we cannot,
but we do go on in the face of their suffering
in the face of her eyes frozen open in death.

We peck at the twigs of history just as birds.
Will this one suffice? Will this one bear
the weight of the nest? Where to pile them? 

Preen and peck and perch. Those who sing,
their voices known, their songs measured.
In silence others wait, weary of the circling
hawk overhead. Still others lie upon the ground,
their breastbones open before the feeding hawk.

Can you push a war down within the mind
where numbers cannot count and people are not people?
See the drift of the low clouds, slow beneath the high ones?
They pass by one another, each on their own path.

Yet I walk and fight myself at every step not to
think, not to look at the jar of horrors that is now
smashed to pieces halfway across the world,
soaking the hot sand in blood. My nest of fables,
like the bodies of those girls, scattered evermore.