Air Support

A dropped school falls through air,
turning slowly as debris
pours from windows: a contrail of papers and books
streams upwards thousands of metres
alongside computers, chairs, desks that tumble amid
woodworking equipment, lockers, maps,
basketballs, stage curtains

all aimed
toward tiny huts far below—a brushy hillside’s
cluster of subsistence farms
reportedly harboring armed men: fenced yards
with a few chickens, one cow, an ancient horse eyeing
six rows of parched vegetables.

Above the school
while it descends,
another follows, and beyond that, nearly invisible,
a third floats as the fighter-bomber arcs
away, and a second jet drones into position.
The pilot of the first, now on the mission’s homeward leg,
reaches down in his cockpit
toward a thermos of hot coffee.

On the ground, hospitals released
in the initial attack wave
erupt sequentially into plumes of fire and dust
as the buildings land: operating tables,
obstetric wards, wheelchairs shatter into shrapnel,
the jagged particles racing outward amid the roiling smoke
to slice through mud walls, animal flesh, stone fences,
human lives that cling to the shaking
shuddering earth
while they clutch forty-year-old rifles
or axes, or the hand of a two-year-old
below the flash of wing
very distant
in the blue-and-white sky.