Witness. Target = Rubble.
by Lori Shridhare
Published in Merion West, February 2025
I write as both the witness and the experiencer.
We appear as two separate individuals.
We are not.
Witness is now the living trace of this encounter.
-Gert-Jan van der Heiden
Echoes of seismic blasts penetrate this skin of memory.
I am under.
Boulders on my back. Polygonals, squares, round.
Slabs.
We try to hide from what our vision sees, but we can't.
What comes next is a crumpled blank page.
Subterranean dust.
Wet fragments.
I hear "You're next."
You say, "Come closer, my love. If only with your eyes."
Waves of moments
wash our bodies
clearing the lens
for presence.
Droplets taste of
dew, honey, sea salt,
melting, in movement,
in stillness.
The essence of seeing
you remains.
The sense of trauma can thus be understood as a particular risk of the way in which a subject matter in a more general sense draws a witness near to or into itself.
--Gert-Jan van der Heiden
Why are the parents missing?
We have a family with no elders.
These ruins can't make a neighborhood.
Darkness and the movements within the basement shatter what's above.
Within the clouds of perception, sensing an unknown fluidity,
while this body walks blindfolded, feeling objects in the dark.
I bow down to what's below my feet.
All we have is ground to stand on.
What happens when we lose the ground?
I witness what's below through my inner eye – the only capacity for sight left.
Underbelly of the earth
absorbs screams,
consecrates the silence.
Aftershocks awaken,
bring water to dry tears of
a sleeping world
as we become the
living cells of the dying.
We thought there couldn't be anything more.
But hurricanes can collide with tornados, can join floods.
Beautiful and horrific are the moment's songs.
I can't feel my back.
The rest of us dissolved.
The torment is shredding us.
Only the parents can punish the remaining children.
Forceful strike on my beloved's arm.
Waving our arms to nobody
The flights out of here don't exist.
We've become a landscape nobody can dream of.
Don't kill that which can't exist anymore.
Your very body is the matrix of crossings too dense for language to articulate.
You are multiple. You are indeterminate. You are pluriversal.
-Bayo Akomolafe
Joy that absolves all of this.
Here, sip from my salivation.
People's hearts don't die in the rubble.
Prison gates can't contain these concave chests,
reservoirs of humility, where whispers still breathe.
I jump to the other side, but my body is stagnating.
Find the life jacket that comes with the lifeboat.
Rubble is not a structure.
From where does silence speak?
What ears can hear the muted voice?
If we go down will we ever get up
The falling, falling, falling, will you pick me up
Time to be held in the arms of the beloved
4. Broken witnesses, limp as wilted filaments in cracked bulbs
The era of the witness.
-Annette Wieviorka
We can't become what we refuse to see.
There isn't a different place than the earth we stand on.
Darting in and out of continents.
Glaciers merged and emerged, joining us once again.
The chafed elbows that link together are
our own
not our own
our own
not our own
Parallel structures and discontinuous thoughts
clamor for attention
The razing of entire beings
Razed. Raised.
Beds.
The landscape, the barren field.
Where does creative power meet destruction?
Can language generate life once the blood stops?
What languages are invited to come through that have not yet been spoken?
Take the scythe.
Remove the debris in the field
The filling of the new creation will come
Has come.
Panic is a vibratory field of fear.
It is lodged in the body.
The calling is the echo of our arrival.
-Thomas Hübl
Seeing that allows steps into finer gradations of light
awake to both the something and the nothing
sitting to be perfectly awake
crying to the one who knows my soul
loving his unspoken soft depths of beauty
5. Voices of despair, long before our ears hear them
Birthing a new form that comes alive
through soil, consecrated compost
pixelated meteor
decimated granite
crystallized limestone
guts and bones
seeped in sand.
Voice of mourning
wails of sorrow
turn this earth into my
life-giving blood
Eyes that moisten the sand under my knees
buds awaken to new growth
Alive....burning into the night
A new form arising
Taking the handful that's mine
grains of hollowed stardust
ashes of skeletons
future of my bones
soil of my skin
the love I'm making
tumbling me towards home
6. Precision
Finding clay
we mold
to shape
this precious
world,
drawn in contours
of touch -
formed softness,
our delicacy of being
Down on my knees, begging for one right word
for consciousness that is never wasted.
Never gone.
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