I saw that. One woman, her personality
described as sweet and her appearance as lovely,
while performing her pre-dawn prayers, watched
the attackers shoot to d**h her husband,
her seven-year-old son, three of her brothers,
as they grabbed her four-year-old son from her arms
and cut his throat, then taking her and her
two sisters away on horses and raping them.
Of course it's genocide. And, yes, it brings
to mind an issue I am constantly aware of
in the making of the poem; Brecht's point,
to write about trees—implicitly, too, to write about
pleasure—in times of k**ing like these, is a crime;
and Paul Celan's response to it, that for Brecht a leaf
is a leaf without a tree, that what kind of times
are these, when a conversation—Celan believed that
a poem is a conversation—what kind of times are these
when a poem is a crime because it includes what must be made explicit.
What one sees and hears and imagines
at the same time—that truth. A sort of relationship
is established between our attention
to what is furthest from us to what
is deepest in us. The immense enlargement
of our perspectives is confronted
by a reduction in our powers of action, which changes the time of one's voice, reducing it to an inner voice
inclined to speak only to those closest to us...