Complicit

These are the days when no words will do.
Such horrors accrue by the phone’s blue light
constant as the wind tonight rattles through
the alleys, a side gate banging to. Rain white
in the gutters, the new year’s promise a kite
flapping in a thunderstorm as you, far
with only second-hand knowledge, rewrite
these lines, for all the good they’ll do. If you’re
silent you are complicit chirps one, our
self-styled moral compass, but certainty
belies difficult truths, as if the world were
a clear-edged colouring book, not poetry.
Outside there is only the wind and the rain
and, overhead, not a single star to be seen.