War Photographer

• “The reassurance of the frame is flexible /– you can think that just outside it”
• “people eat, sleep, love normally /while I seek out the tragic, the absurd”
• “a pair of peach, sun-gilded girls /rolling, silk-crumpled, on the grass /in champagne giggles”
• “a small girl staggering down some devasted street, /hip thrust out under a baby’s weight”
• “the first bomb of the morning […] she dropped her burden/ and, mouth too small for her dark scream/, began to run…”
• “Their caption read /‘Even in hell the human spirit /triumphs over all’. /But […] its boundaries /arbitrary as a blood stain on a wall”
• • Satyamurti is a sociologist (sociology: study of development/ structure/ functioning of human society)
  • She’s a contemporary poet – look into painful subjects (cancer/war) & fragility of human life
  • Written during a time period of several major conflicts (Iraq/Iran War, Wars in South African, Troubles in N. Ireland, Lebanon War, Sri Lankan Civil War & 2nd Sudanese Civil War).
  • Poem draws on experience of modern warfare & arbitrary nature of suffering (not specific conflict)