words fail

Sitting hunched in the rubble, Mesut Hancer keeps hold of his 15-year-old daughter Irmak as she lies dead on her bed beneath the slabs of concrete, smashed windows and broken bricks that were once apartments.

(Turkey-Syria earthquake 2023)

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019), “In Blackwater Woods” (excerpt), New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1 (1992)