11
" War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain — everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time.
If you are critically ill — with cancer, for instance — there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can't leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return — polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks — from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold.
As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who remain have nothing new to talk about. You can't get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you.
Wartime looks like this. "
― Janine Di Giovanni , The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria
16
" Artifact
As long as I can remember you kept the rifle--
your grandfather's an antique you called it-
in your study, propped against the tall shelves
that held your many books. Upright,
beside those hard-worn spins, it was another
backbone of your pas, a remnant I studied
as if it might unlock-- like the skeleton key
its long body resembled-- some door i had yet
to find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bullet
as you described: spiraling through the bore
and spinning straight for its target. It did not hit me
then: the rifle I'd inherited showing me
how one life is bound to another, that hardship
endures. For years I admired its slender profile,
until-- late one night, somber with drink--you told me
it still worked, that you kept it loaded just in case,
and I saw the rifle for what it is; a relic
sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret. "
― Natasha Trethewey , Thrall
17
" If I could make people feel, just for a day or an hour, what it’s like to love with infiniteness, then they would be animals no longer, but some greater creature, deserving of that title human. I’ve bettered a day though. On earth, they will have it thus: from birth to unavoidable death, a man is pumped so full of love that his eyes bleed rainbows and his mouth a barrel of miracles. His hands will heal then make monuments to commemorate it; they’ll press tight and pray for no man, no god but himself; and his mind… his mind will shower like spring rains. He will steal away from the shadow of ambition. He’ll be his own sun and light up the world with new marvels – be they art, philosophies, science – and in his brightness put the mundane, not himself, in shadows, and how rightfully. Each a captain and a maker, a mark-setter and stealer of shows... Earth’s skies will clap with the thunder of our majesty, not with violence, doubt, confusion, futility, and monotony; anything – anything – but the dull drone of duplication and robo-behaviour. "
― Richard Ronald Allan , Exit Eleonora
