President Putin gave up peace for Lent
he gave it up well before Lent started,
since then all normal news has been cancelled.
The news will not go back
to the stock market indexes
being quoted at the end of every bulletin,
as if they are the financial weather, for a long time yet.
What we will get instead is the daily disarray
where the news is driven on
by pictures of tanks and bombs
which as they trample over buildings
make redundant texts and reason,
and helped us rediscover
how horribly photogenic
bombed buildings can be.
But enough about the abstract sculptures
in now uninhabitable spaces,
and latest deadly human statistics
that the war on Ukraine has created,
they are merely the outward signs
of the latest existential threat,
which is merely updates
all the threats that have gone before.
For now civilians in far off countries
are caught between wanting their troubles
to appear to be small and the reality
that is there for us all, of realising
that for our wanting small troubles
what we want is to become
uncomfortably unimportant.
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