If there is ink.

(Amherst, MA, 03/04/2022)

If there is ink for this hour if there is something to say to write that would send the tanks the convoys and transports into reverse on the roads they have rutted send them back to the borders they crossed send them back, and the hours too that have passed since dawn on the twenty-fourth day of the second month send those hours with them, and the enemy soldiers dragging with them their crematorium and the corpses of their fellow soldiers they have left behind and their own wounded send them back if there is ink if there is something to write that would raise the cities from the ruins the apartment blocks hospitals schools that would put the cities back as they were I would give everything to fill my pen with it

Carolyn Forché is a poet, translator, and activist. Her most recent books are What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin, 2019) and In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin US / Bloodaxe Books UK, 2020).