Even If We Thought We Killed Everything, Something Would Still Eat the Corpses

It’s strange to read a poet

Writing in a time of war

Or other calamity

Who does not give us the war

Or sieve the calamity

In any vivid detail—

What is wrong with this poet?

Cowardice? Complicity?

Some kind of moral vacuum?

Is this justifiable

By terror of censorship,

Traditions of the genre?

Does this writer simply lack

The genius, the resources

To rise to the occasion?

When life sets down to a feast

Of exceptional malice,

With heaps of mortality

And lashings of destruction,

Who does not describe the meal?

Who questions life’s conditions?