After the Boston Marathon Bombing by Susan Cohen - Rattle: Poetry (original) (raw)

I interrogated the God I claim I don’t believe in

the way the brain questions a leg ripped away at the knee

and will not accept its desertion

the way a severed artery shouts into the void

the way nerves keep firing at phantoms

the way a scared soldier obeys no commander

shooting blindly into the suffering air

Susan Cohen

“With the trial and sentencing of Dzhokar Tsarnaev, I relived some of the outrage I’ve felt as religion increasingly has been used to justify atrocity. In such a time, I find myself slipping back into the internal conversation of my childhood, bargaining with and wheedling God. This poem is an expression of loss: lost limbs, lost life, lost belief, lost innocence.”