It is 10.40pm in Paris and they have taken hostages at the Bataclan
It is 11pm and somewhere on Facebook
a kid posts: “they are killing everybody.
one by one.”
It is 4pm in Melbourne and my friend is giving birth
to a little boy named Clancy
but I don’t know that yet.
It is 1am everywhere and mothers in Lebanon are still weeping.
It is every hour of every day
and mothers in Palestine
can’t remember when they started weeping
We are all headed to some town in our hearts
where we are going to die, sooner, or later,
where we are dying now in a hail of bullets.
Martin Luther King said
that only love can fight hate
but at 10.30am when they are exploding children
at a school in Peshawar it is so hard
to feel anything but despair
and in my head there is a radio man who says I am
listening to Los Angeles and in so many ways it’s true
as this offensive parody of Team America’s opening credits
rolls on and I am not so sure any more as
#porteouverte reveals we are all listening
to our own love or hate and tuned in
to the station that suits us
It is 3am in Paris and I am waiting for loved ones
to check themselves in as safe in a way
that the friends of Syrians have never been able to
It is 5am and the body of a little boy washes up on a beach
and for a minute and a half — relatively —
we all pay attention to what has been happening
for decades
It is 9am and my partner switches off the radio
halfway through an eyewitness report
and I thank him on behalf of our daughter
who isn’t even in the room at the time
It is 9am and it will be 9am again tomorrow
and there are children and new babies and new lovers
and some lives go on even though the radio man says
we are all in some way or another
going to Reseda someday to die
(with thanks to Screenwriter’s Blues by Soul Coughing which for some unknown reason started playing in my head this morning, the day after the terrorist attacks on Paris)