War Runs Across My Life

War Runs Across My Life

This digital world
lingers
and does not bring
us closer together.

I only see
my self with the help
of telescopes.
Every love song
reminds me of sadness,
every sad song
remind me of a plastic
radion. When will this end?

We are torn apart,
slightly separated
by the presence
of conflict, bombs,
some scholar might say
the sweep
of world events;
yet it is back
to the feelings
of distance, the desolation

that you are
not here and may not
be, that causes
an unspoken anguish
I can share with no one.

And they say this digital world
brings us closer together,
"they", hmmm, who? who?
And yet when we talk,
I at night
and you
in the morning,
message by message,
it is only the distance
that is illuminated,
a trembling, quail distance.

I see these threads
unwinding finally,
back to a river in Vietnam,
a bear from a mountain
drinking in a cold river
far to close to the mouth.
The sunlight breaks the horizon,
water turns to desert,
the sand coming out of
your brown hair.


Mark Brunke

Posted over on Poets Against The War