(i.m. Marie Colvin, 1956-2012)
All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war
— Robert Lowell, ‘Fall 1961’
My father, who’d had
‘about as much as he could take’
by ’44, and still woke
swearing at flies
and soaked in sweat,
read the Telegraph
in dread and disbelief
over his first cigarette,
narrowing his eyes
against the scroll of smoke…
Only half-awake,
dreaming a bitter,
penitential cup
of coffee, we squint
at a screen instead of print,
swipe through
and see plump child-men
jerked by the strings
of Twitter,
their sad posturings
that could turn us to smoke
before we can even laugh.
A father’s no shield
for his child – nor
a husband for his wife…
Nothing now is a joke,
nothing is so mad or bad
it cannot happen.
To that ‘well-meaning guy’
outside a club in Paddington
who saw her lighting up
and told her she should stop,
Marie just said:
‘I promise you,
this isn’t how I’ll die.’
