Bonus Poem : Witness. Target = Rubble. by Lori Shridhare

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.

 

1. 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.

 

 

2. 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. 

 

3. 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?

 

1. If we go down will we ever get up

2. The falling, falling, falling, will you pick me up

3. 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?

 

1. Take the scythe.

2. Remove the debris in the field

3. The filling of the new creation will come

4. Has come.

5. Panic is a vibratory field of fear.

6. 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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