Questioning a Tank
Into the shocked, shucked shell
of the hospital at Kunduz, which
for ten days past, in streaming light
(the season’s slant of sun), has spilled
a steaming trail of twisted bricks,
chewed up rails, a grieving mist – the site
where the counted, cradled sick
burned up, the still un-
bordered doctors tell, in beds
the red-blue bombers targeted
and turned to smoking tar –
into the murdered spectacle,
a spangled, metal beast, a tank,
has since arrived, to crinkle
underneath its feet
the very residues of war,
a mounting dust-heap mingled
in its wake, whose quiet particles
now drift and sway,
dissolving in the blue –
as the learned pugilographer
appears in print, enrobed
in points of lucidation, the buff
and cleanly Michael Newton,
who, pending
Pentagon investigation, will clarify
the one un-
answered question thrice
for all concerned:
Who had control, that day,
of base-defensive protocols?
Why include
a hospital
among the targets pre-approved?
And what, he wonders,
happened on the ground?
Feature Image: Kabul, Afghanistan. 5th Nov, 2015. The damaged sign of the Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in Kunduz is displayed at a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, 5 November 2015. A month after the US airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, the aid organisation has repeated calls for an inquiry. PHOTO: MOHAMMAD JAWAD/DPA/Alamy Live News.