or The Poem I Can’t Write

It’s hard to write poems
when there’s a new disaster every day
each one louder, crueler, closer to the bone.

I keep asking myself things like:

– How many ways must we break this world
before we forget how to name the pieces?
– How much devastation can a person
witness and still return to their own breath?
– How much despair can we hold before
it spills into us too deep?

I want to believe there’s a bottom
a place we hit, then rise.

But sometimes I think the fall
is the only thing we’re certain of.

Still, we brace. We reach. We hold hands.
We light lamps in the dark.

I don’t have answers.
I don’t even have a poem, not really,

just these questions,
just this ache,

just the motion of my pen
trying to make something out of the silence.