Vinkovci

Vinkovci

This time worn road is one upon which
The Legions of Rome once marched.
Straight, uncompromising, the spine of the salient.
Lines of pleasant, well spaced oaks give way
To rows of once neat, shuttered windows
Only the absence of people, as if visited by plague
Bar the way to normality.

Soon, vehicles are no longer noticed
Coming from the opposite direction.
The forced laughter and grinning bravado
Gives way to pensive, taciturn silence.
And the admission of one's own helpless vulnerability.

More rubble scattered across Valentinian's way
Iced with shattered glass.
Rubble piled as high as men in some places
Red and white dust permeates
Every crack and crevice, every gutter.

Fading, old world provincial facades
Have taken a battering
Punctuated with black holes of irreparable horror.
Pockmarks blight every surface.
Gaping wounds like open, elderly mouths
Beseeching, where rafters protrude like broken, rotting teeth.

Pile of smashed roof-tiles cascade in an avalanche
Onto the roadside.
Blackened carcasses of homes
Laid open to baleful grey clouds and the rain
Beds, cupboards, TV's, clothing, books
Lay smashed and scattered around, uncollected.

Massive, deep craters sit truculent in the
Center of the road. Soldiers, cars, tanks must all take care.
Nobody here to think to place a traffic cone.

A pleasant boulevard once.
Giant branches flop like broken arms,
Splintered limbs trailing to the ground
Or lie close by, finger leaves retract, relinquishing life.
Age lined trunks bear savage, livid wounds
Of shrapnel, jagged shards embedded through bark.

Pik-Vinkovci is a vast office block
Once white-limed, modernist freshness
Every last window on each open plan floor shattered
Plastic blinds hanging out like torn eyelids
Smoke blackened walls, the lingering stink
Of incinerated resin, rubber, man-made fibre

Sometimes there's an abstract curve of dried blood.
The trail where they carried him to the waiting ambulance
A boot, white packaging from the dressings, discarded,
Blown against a nearby wall or clinging to the grate of a drain.

The most pretty thing I have seen
The pattern of a mortar bomb on asphalt or concrete
Like an exploding star, or the splash of a teardrop on slate
It's fragile imprint captured for a split-second in time.

Metal caught in the soles of boots
Like gravel in a tyre's tread.
Shrapnel everywhere,
Yet no eager schoolboys here to venture out
Of a morning to collect on the way to school.
So it rusts, orange
And bleeds ochre into the ground.

Nothing spared, the elderly church has received
More blows than a battered wife
Its copper onion-spire collapsed
Into the square below. Futile white tarpaulin
Stretched across gaping holes
Like a blanket across the back of a shivering mare.

Every road sign, every traffic light,
Every hoarding, lamp-post and dislocated gutter-pipe
Every car moving or otherwise is riddled
Like a sieve in every metal-skin surface
Walls scarred by a pox of hot, jagged steel against stone.
A pox of shellfire left by a clammy fever of war.

Nowhere is unburdened of this oppressive air
Of desolation and hurried, fearful abandonment.
Black-brown smoke curls up with
Chemical stench from a dozen rooftops.
Yellowed, fibrous loft insulate floats down
Like gentle snow. All around.

Every ten seconds, right on the nose
The timpanic boom of a detonation
To the left, then the right, then behind somewhere,
Across town, sometimes right on top of you.

Fling yourself into a pile of rubble
Bury your face sinner, as the punishing blast
Shakes your skull, rattles your teeth
Bringing tiles, brick and dust, God's wrath down
Upon you, coating shoulders, back and legs.

Sudden death walks these streets
With a tangible, malevolent presence.
Stay out of its hateful way,
Inside, indoors, down below, anywhere.

The aerosol greeting beneath the sign does not joke.
Sends a chill through the warmest of hearts;

Vinkovci
" welkom to hel "