Wednesday, May 14, 2025

If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real by Aleksandar Hemon

If This Were a Movie, You’d Think It Real
 
That which doesn’t have to be named
just keeps being until it’s all undone.
Beyond all that, the world is negotiable
 
and cool, with readjusted coloring,
invisible pain—an ad for a harmless hell.
See the Styrofoam moon in a painted sky,
 
casting no light, just matted reflections,
the stars lurking through the tin-sky holes,
designed in a void that has never moved.
 
But just below, the passing birds, notches
in the night, with news of the cursed tribe
whose stories have no end or beginning,
 
who never lived but must now all be killed.
Cities razed, boats sunk, children drowned,
kindle wood carved from ancient olive trees,
 
shrapnel-shredded bodies in tall heaps.
The birds sing in mourning for the absent
gone unburied, never, nowhere to be found,
 
those who were there or here not so long ago,
asking us: Your name? Where do you come from?
Why are you with us when the others are dead?
 



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