‘War is not nice’—Barbara Bush

There is a picture of you that we love,

Taken when you were only three months old.

In it you’re lying on the sun-warmed, deep-veined wood

Of an old pine table.  Between the wood and you,

There is the day’s newspaper, blazoned with

The spin of a world that isn’t yours and can’t

Seem true.  But there you lie—innocently

Staring past the camera’s smitten gaze,

While Bush stares out from under you.

You look so nice: fresh-dressed and still warm from

Your bath—calm as the sun’s unknowing light,

New but not news, a sign that all is right.

   —

The line of bodies on the table in

The dust-white room are children.

Part of the news they lie upon, they can’t

Look out at me, because their faces are

Rubbed out.  In Beit Hanoun, the sun seems spent:

The blasts drop like a shutter’s blink and break

The moment when the child looks and the lens

Looks and the newspaper image blithely grins

Into a million messy shards. 

The table and children and paper and dust appear

Recycled as the morning’s front-page news,

And we—we turn it over so you will not see.