WE LIVED HAPPILY DURING THE WAR

                                                                  

 And when they bombed other people houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them, but not enough.  I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling : invisible house by invisible house by invisible house--  I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.

Poem by Ilya Kaminsky.  Published by Padraig OTuama in Poetry Unbound. 

Ilya is a deaf man , a refugee from Odessa who sought asylum in the US after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine .  Padraig describes this as a "Devastating poem about complicity" 

                                       < Excerpted from the Catholic Worker April 2023>