The Teatime Bulletin Poem by David Cooke

It's early evening and the TV set is on.
You lay the table and the children scream
as fraying ends of day unravel.
Through the mayhem of boxes, bricks and cars
you enter a room with plates
where sounds of appetite assail you.

While relayed at a saving distance
there is news of war, a drawn-out violence
that now annuls some formalist's haven.
In a sealed off quarter of a dusty city
bodies lie where heat is hazing -
a postcard prospect with trees
and benches, a straggle of shops that frames
the square, its dry air cracks to a dull staccato
as hours away in that glimmering focus
events wash like waves
that break on a brittle shore.

The faces there are representative,
their features blurred to a cipher, and bodies
rot, unclaimed, slumped in a final statement.