Nice/France: two months on - a memory

The smell of dried blood and urine

Washed and bleached

And bleached and washed

Will live in this place for a long time.

Memories will lessen and

The immediate horror will be computed into the past

The horrors of the past,

Like the wars and the famines and the revolutions.

That integral part of our present

Without the smell of blood and bleach.

In the silence of the late morning

In this place, the ordinary sounds

Seem bleached out, cars and buses are silent,

People's voices can only be heard as the last echo

Far away, muddled in with the horror of the moment.

The screams and shouts of that evening,

The panic and gut wrenching fright is there frozen

In the middle of the smells.

You can hear them but you can't really,

They are there in your mind,

They cry out for you, at you.

But you can't see,

The past is over

What is left is a broken memory

A broken community

And anonymous silent screams and unshed tears.

Real horror never makes room for tears and scream.

Those are always self-contained

And lived in a world of their own.

We come and see as pilgrims of another age,

Looking for relics and memories and we get bleach

And piss and dried blood.

We are the sightseers in search of cheap thrills,

We don’t dwell on silent bleach.

We walk through Ephesus or Wounded Knee and want to see,

Hear smell and understand

But it doesn'twork like that.