They have dressed the killing in moral words,
laundered the syllables of slaughter until they
shine like grand policy from a white office,
and regret is worn like a dazzling medal,
‘necessary’, they say, ‘proportionate’,
as if the equation of the dead could be solved
for x where x equals the precise grief a nation may
feel before the language turns.

And the good is an open mass grave,
stretched to hold the rubble and the reason
in one seamless paragraph,
justified by the cornered animal
that knows only the radius of its fear,
and strikes with the self-same jaw that
tore its own flesh open,
and then labels it survival,
calls it a sovereign right,
calls it what the naming class
has always called the bloodsport
it does not have to wash from its own hands.

And we, the literate,
the ones informed, who consume the
headlines and images with morning coffee,
nod at ‘targeted’, swallow ‘surgical’,
we ingest the euphemisms
with no bitter aftertaste,
let the sanitary nouns do their
silent work of keeping
terror in the coldness of a
well-constructed sentence,
as if vocab could absolve,
as if the full stop at the completion
was anything but another strategy
of looking away.

 

28/3/2026