their hands, bodies by ahkos ahkos


This poem horrifies me. War should horrify me more than it does, but I do not see it; the same goes for death. This writer, however, does: he sees aftermath and tells of it in such a way that is almost unbearable. The language is simple. It does not condemn war or explain a fear of death with lofty terms because, really, that’s not how we understand it (if we understand it at all). Its simplicity, however, should not be mistaken for plainness; every aspect of this poem is very calculated, very thought-out; even the use of space between words and thoughts is used to sink the reader into a grey, silent, awful sort of trapped-in-your-own-head feeling. The repetition is sporadic but perfectly planned – it doesn’t sound like a writing mechanism; it just sounds the way a person’s thoughts would go if they were facing an ocean of bodies. It sounds like an oncoming panic attack, like the taste of almost being sick.