This sonnet by Travis Poling was composed to bear witness to the bombing of an open-air market in Iraq in 2007
Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad, March 2007
By Travis Poling
By chance the sky was calm that morning.
Locals milled through the open street, browsed books,
turned pages, visioned worlds beyond this war:
a yam farmer resisting the new church priest,
a boy with a seed finding one word: unless,
a cricket practicing her song every night.
The sun glared through the stalls off the pages,
but the people kept reading.
They didn’t hear the car engine gunning
behind them till the shriek of brakes grinded
in a singular block-busting blast.
These paper worlds, incinerated, leaped
for the freedom of the sky—
as thirty dreaming bodies struck the earth.
Travis Poling is a minister and artist who writes poetry, teaches college English, and curates worship at Richmond Church of the Brethren in Indiana. He blogs at The Poet-Liturgist