The Commute

Summary

I am new to this – six am, dark and rain,

the train an illuminated cabinet

for the half-awake, half-out-of-dream –

initiate to the ritual of ear-bud and book,

coffee held like an offering to the tunnel

that consumes us, eyes bruised pods

consulting the oracle of a discarded Metro.

Gun-fire, bomb-blast, kick of bullet so far off

we have to reach with our minds for the turn

of the planet, her colours in that black expanse

tilted and blurred like a child's spinning top,

all the people clinging to it; and you, child,

in your sarcophagus of grit and dirt,

the lid just lifted in some wrecked street

of Aleppo, the centerfold, centrifuge of my gaze,

clay white, your face an effigy, the death mask

of a poet, a flour-dusted prophet waving

one free hand to say: here, I am here; I am alive.

How carefully now they must unbury you –

the bulbs of your eyes, the flowers of your lips –

unsealing your mouth's preserved terracotta

to take your first clear breath for days.

How you must have dreamt, in your cave

of rubble, to be the boy king resurrected

into daylight's lapis lazuli, air's fluid metal.

But who am I to write this? In a few minutes

I will step from the train when it pulls into the station,

blink in the sun gracing the platform, my destination.