Letter to a City Under Siege

Turning the pages of the book you have lent me of your wounded city,
reading the braille on its walls, walking beneath ghost chestnuts
past fires that turn the bullet-shattered windows bronze,
flaring an instant without warming the fallen houses
where you sleep without water or light, a biscuit tin between you,
or later in the café ruins, you discuss all night the burnt literature
borrowed from a library where all books met with despair.
I wanted to give your notes back to you, to be
printed in another language, not yours or mine but a tongue
understood by children who make bulletproof vests out of cardboard.
We will then lie down in the cemetery where violets grew in your childhood
before snipers fired on the city using gravestones for cover. 
Friend, absent one, I can tell you that your tunnel is still there,
mud-walled and hallowed of earth, dug for smuggling
oranges into the city—oranges!—bright as winter moons by the barrow-load. 
So let’s walk further up the street, to the hill where one is able to see
the city woven in fog, roofs filled with sky, uprooted bridges,
and a shop window where a shard of glass hangs over the spine of a book.
The library burns on page sixty, as it burns in all the newspapers of the world,
and the clopping of horses’ hooves isn’t the sound of clopping horses.
From here a dog finds his way through snow with a human bone.
And what else, what more? Even the clocks have run out of time.
But, my good friend, the tunnel! There is still a tunnel for oranges.