Until I Saw Photos from Bahkmut
I didn’t care much for the surrealists,
those artists who have no use for reason’s
steady narrative, preferring the gut punch
of the injured psyche, the bruise of a dream
that leaves us wounded even when awake.
But today, this photograph of a country town,
a photo journalist’s image taken quickly–
no time for composition, no time to shape
our common reality–has changed my mind.
It was just a hamlet really, before the bombs
fell, leaving steeples and cottages in ruin.
The focal point a soldier working a backhoe,
clearing rubble from the town square,
digging around the roots of an ancient oak
that was supposed to anchor this scene
in a fairy tale. In the foreground, a blood
stained pillow and lace curtains tangled
in the mud, and closer still, a child dangling
a stuffed rabbit by its paw and a woman in
a fur coat adjusting her pink cashmere hat.
*
Cathryn Essinger is the author of five books of poetry–A Desk in the Elephant House, from Texas Tech University Press, My Dog Does Not Read Plato, and What I Know About Innocence, both from Main Street Rag. Her most recent collections are The Apricot and the Moon and Wings, Or Does the Caterpillar Dream of Flight?, both from Dos Madres Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, The Southern Review, Rattle, New Directions anthologies, Ecotone, Terrain and other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcarts and “Best of the Net,” featured on The Writer’s Almanac, and reprinted in American Life in Poetry.
