FOB Rob. 4.30am. Shaken bolt awake by the bass boom of the perimeter 50s. Kit shouldered swiftly. Out into the dregs of a night flickering blue black / bright white, strobed with bursts of muzzle flash light to the stuttering rhythms of the firefight Faces tense and tight, […]
PNSpring2012
Prisoner of War
After the camp he returned, folding himself, bringing back nothing, except this swivelling way of watching everyone, everywhere. She waited while he stripped the chicken carcass, every sliver, not a scrap wasted, leaving the bones polished, scoured of meat; a gleam on the plate. It was only over with the last shred eliminated, […]
The Art of War
Dispatched to our recycle bins the women, children and their plastic bags to be composted images and bulletins. A naked napalm victim’s peeling skin, arse-kicking goose-steps and salutes to flags dispatched to our recycle bins with flattened cities, shrapnelled bodies sinking into mud, the queues of refugees in rags to be composted images […]
In the Museum
Baked into this wall, imperial guards look out aslant, each pupil blank, Assyria’s bit of rough. Here is the hawkhead god whose hissing spite can just be heard if you lean close enough, Rome in her marble regimentals licensed to kill for Senate and People – now fighter planes shell out democracy […]
Muslim Girl
When they had finished with her and with her mother she climbed a tree and hung herself – a girl in a red sweater that her mother had knitted. This is one front page image I remember from the Srebrenica massacre. If we could live inside the memory of ‘Once there was a village that […]