Loud

(Epigraph:)
Parents with mutilated children have been turned away from the empty hospital and told to hire smugglers to take them across the border to Quetta, a Pakistani frontier city at least six hours away by car.
(Afghanistan, 28 October 2001)

(Poem:)
The News had often made her shout,
but one day her voice ripped out of her throat
like a firework, with a terrible sulphurous crack
that made her jump, a flash of light in the dark
Now she was loud.

Before, she’d been easily led,
one of the crowd, joined in with the national whoop
for the winning goal, the boos for the bent MP, the cheer
for the royal kiss on the balcony. Not any more. Now
she could roar.

She practiced alone at home, found
she could call abroad without using the phone, could sing
like an orchestra in the bath, could yawn like thunder
watching TV. She switched to the News. It was all about
Muslims, Christians, Jews.

Then her scream was a huge bird
that flew away into the dark; each vast wing a shriek,
awful to hear, the beak the sickening hiss of a thrown spear.
She stayed up there all night, in the wind and rain, wailing,
uttering lightning.

Down, she was pure sound, rumbling
like an avalanche. She bit radios, swallowed them, gargled
their News, till the words were - *ran into a church and sprayed
the congregation with bullets no one has claimed* - gibberish, crap, in the cave of her mouth.

Her voice stomped through the city, shouting the odds, shaking the bells awake in their towers.
She yelled through the countryside, swelling the rivers, felling
the woods. She put out to sea, screeching and bellowing,
spewing brine.

She bawled at the moon and it span away
into space. She hollered into the dark where fighter planes
buzzed at her face. She howled till every noise in the world
sang in the spit on the tip of her tongue: the shriek of a bomb,
the bang of a gun,

the prayers of the priest, the pad of the feet
in the mosque, the casual rip of the post, the mothers' sobs,
the thump of the drop, the President's cough, the screams
of the children cowering under their pews, loud, loud,
louder, the News.