It's Still Life

London: 7/7

We call it seven seven,
the day bombs detonated.
The Underground. The buses.
Explosions in backpacks.
We returned to the darkness,
crippled as spine-broken books.
But we are nowhere near dead.

© Misky 2016

The response: The London Bombings of 7/7/2005. We lived in false security, a false sense of safety. So many years since the last IRA attack. The bombings, the dead and injured, the terror — it all started again. The constraint in this piece is the number 7: 7 syllables per line, and 7 lines.

Written for University of Iowa’s Whitman’s Civil War: Writing and Imaging Loss, Death, and Disaster. Class 1 Assignment: In the Class 1 video, it was noted that at “disruptive historical moments, some of the most experimental and radical artists and writers return to measured and traditional forms. In words or images, compose a response to a “rupture” in a particular history – an event that you think was a defining moment at a particular place, a moment when something seemed to break open or to be dramatically exposed, a moment of dramatic importance – and use a constraint to shape your response.”