After the first attack,Both our language and our music were beyond repair.

The UN and NGOs workmen are doing their best, tidying up.
Their wrecking balls and pickaxes break up our metaphors and similes.

Look. In ostrich plumes of dust, poems fall, crashing like dropped chandeliers.
Our books are gone, finished.
Pickaxes eat their blue way through white paper domes, black letters,
Us.

Outside music is burning on fires all over town.
(People walk past the heaps in silence, looking for food or money.)

Notes are hacked from the stretched whale
innards of gutted symphonies.
Some phrases survive, are hauled off on the backs of trucks by foreign troops.
Big bits sometimes end in museums, or bars.
Oddments go to flea markets -are pickled in jars-
Or swapped by kids in playgrounds.

And inside all the radios, televisions and kitchens
Everyone is silent because
Smoke from these fires is a gag across the mouth of our world.