and the bombs sing their requiem in silent accord
while those with blood stained civil hands
think themselves out of thoughts
while running from their own feet
and here find strained in protest
words to pierce the ear of grief
and find that an elusive possession,
human identity,  is trampled by larcenous wiles
such a theft that suffuses a merciless and malicious twinship
both spurious and misplaced
and produces understandings that mystify
by a succession of inexplicable events
disorientates and masks
a comedy of daylight thoughts
at once touching and grotesque
where disorientation and danger lurk
and have us believe, that which would
restore order and reason
making the ordinary world ordinary again
becomes lost in its co-ordinates
of a self made illusion
whose features lead to an uncertainty
at once plausible and disturbing
one distinguished by solemnities
of disturbed incompetence of well meaning
whose distance of sorrow evaporates
in a poignant lament

Erasure & Found Poem from
"On Photography By Teju Cole in april 16th new york times magazine

--

You were The fast moving disaster of a tsunami
added to the slow motion disaster
of a nuclear calamity

Towns flooded
Infrastructure wrecked
Forests splintered
more than 15,000 people dead.
earthquake cut off
my external power supply
Floodwaters damaged my backup generators
Disabled it's cooling system
Overheating ensued
Fuel in three reactor cores melted
Releasing radiation

Everyone saw The water coming in
The roads swept away
Towns and harbors destroyed

Extensive documentary work
was undertaken by photographers
Of the ruins,
Debris,
Cleanup and relief operations

The gut-wrentching scale of destruction
The professionalism of the emergency crews
The fortitude of the survivers

The extreme uncertainty I feel
in our current political moment
helps me understand for the first time
the curious twinship
of mourning and premonition.

Information
about the tragedy
Sorrow for the suffering it caused
Gratitude for the work
that makes sorrow visible
Foreboding about the future.

An alert flashes
your phone
Something terrible has happened
Far away, a flood, an airstrike,
Soon, there's footage of people picking through wreckage
what used to be their homes

It is easy to pity them
Difficult to imagine this will be you
Suddenly bereft of a solid place in the world.

Listening to anything
that touches on the sublime
makes me apprehensive.

Like The silence that greets us
waking in the middle of the night

Oh sea,
how you shine with the moon
Dancing in rhythm but never touching
For the moon does not belong to you
He must chase sunlit skies and
Light dark corners
Yet he will return and you can dance
Again in the beauty of twinship.