I. The Funeral and the Fire
They buried a man in Qom this week
whose name was said in one breath with God's,
and the crowds pressed close as water
around the small dark boat of his coffin.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, someone decided
that the mourning would not pause the missiles.
There had been a promise of a pause.
Promises being what they are,
a species of weather:
forecast, then contradicted.
So the strikes fell on Iran
while the funeral was still warm,
and both sides used the word decisive,
which is the word people reach for
when nothing has been decided at all.
I would like to ask the strategists
one question, the smallest one:
did anyone consult the ships
in the Strait of Hormuz,
who wanted only to carry oil
from one thirst to another?
II. The Alliance
In Turkey the allies gathered
to discuss who would defend whom,
and in what order, and at whose expense:
the eternal arithmetic of fear.
One large voice said: do less.
The others said: do more,
though not, of course, themselves.
This is how history is made now:
not with a bang, not even a whimper,
but with a spreadsheet
and a man frowning at the total.
Somewhere a general points at a map.
The map does not point back.
The rivers on it keep flowing
in the direction rivers prefer,
indifferent to the arrows.
III. The Woman Who Will Run
A court in France said to a woman:
*you are guilty, and also
you may run for president,
provided you wear this
for a year*,
a small device, an ankle,
a leash of the modern kind.
She said yes to all of it.
Ambition is like that:
it will wear anything,
it will wear a tag to a coronation.
I am not saying this to condemn her.
I am only marveling, again,
at how the human animal
can hold two truths in one fist:
I am shamed and I am owed.
We are all a little like that.
We are all running for something,
tagged by something,
appealing to some higher court
that may not be in session.
IV. The Broadcaster Apologizes
In Hungary the state television
put up a black screen
and the single word sorry.
Sorry for the years of lying.
Then it stopped broadcasting altogether,
as if truth, having spoken once,
needed to lie down in a dark room.
I confess I found this beautiful
in the way that terrible things
can be beautiful for a moment:
a whole channel of the invisible,
years of it, folded up
and set out with the evening trash.
But I have lived long enough
under the wallpaper of official truth
to know how quickly a new pattern
is pasted over the old.
The screen will not stay black.
Screens never do.
V. The Ball and the Beer
And there was, of course, the football.
A referee in Miami made a decision,
and the decision made the news
larger than the goal it disallowed.
Men threw beer at other men.
A boy on a livestream
was told to go cry at the zoo,
a sentence I have to write down twice
to believe a human said it,
and a human did, out loud,
to a stranger, for sport.
We invented the game
to give the war a rest.
Look how we honor it.
VI. What the Cat Knew
But here, finally, is the item
I have saved, the way one saves
the one clean grape at the bottom of the bowl.
In Uganda they tested a lotion
made from catnip, homegrown, cheap,
against the great chemical Deet,
the pride of laboratories.
And the catnip won. It held the mosquitoes off
exactly as well as the expensive thing,
which is to say: the cats were right.
The cats have been right the whole time,
rolling in the green weed of their certainty
while we filed patents.
I want you to hold this
next to the missiles and the tag
and the black screen and the beer.
Not to cancel them out.
Nothing cancels them out.
But to keep the scales honest.
On the same Tuesday that we burned a coast
and argued over the price of defending each other,
a plant we ignored for centuries
quietly saved a child from fever.
VII. The Weather, Which Is Also News
Here in Kraków it is 16 degrees
and partly cloudy –
the sky doing its usual honest work,
neither promising nor apologizing,
letting the light through in patches
the way meaning gets through: irregularly.
I stand at the window.
The linden does not know about Iran.
The pigeon on the sill
has filed no appeal, wears no tag,
throws no beer, tells no lies
worse than this crumb is mine.
Sixteen degrees. Partly cloudy.
Somewhere the world is deciding
what is decisive.
Here a cat is licking its paw,
having been, all along,
correct about the mosquitoes,
and modest about it,
which is the rarest news of all.