Howard Firkin
Impossibly innocuous, it comes
as black as lava, sulphurous with dreams
and debris, boiling, oily rubble teems
across the landscape screens and numbs.
This can’t be, as it stares us in the face.
Immediate and future, nothing stops
and everything is gone, as blank as silt,
the tumbled coloured blocks a child has spilt,
the tiny chaos when a tea tray drops,
destruction of the sacred commonplace.

We see the images. They don’t make sense.
We hear the words: they surge and wash around,
incomprehensible; our last defence:
abandonment of light and touch and sound.