News of a Posting, 1991

This is the first time you realise
the world does not look like
the inside of your mother’s kitchen.

It is not cosy or neat with oak table
scrubbed clean and garden flowers
in a yellow jug.

It is not teenage sibling love or even
sibling rage, awful as that seems now.
That is not awe.

Right now, you find the loudness
of your grandfather’s radio intolerable.
That is not loud.

This is the first time you realise
that the kitchen could
            explode
                        at any time
into a billion shards, so you can no longer tell
what is counter or table or jug or petal.

That brazen thugs run the world and pipe shards
of discord direct into your racing thoughts.

That these are the same people who just injected
your uncle and his crew with a miracle drug
before shipping them off to Desert Storm.

When you hear the news that he’s already gone,
you realise nothing will be certain again,
nothing done can be undone.

You will be OK. But you need to find a way
to turn down the volume so that you can bear
anything, be proof against anything.

Start to prepare now, as if
it were inevitable.

Note: “Nothing done can be undone” is a paraphrase of Lady Macbeth’s words in Act 5 Scene 1 of Macbeth: “What’s done cannot be undone” as she wander the corridors with the imaginary blood of guilt on her hands.