Poem: Questioning A Tank

Questioning a Tank

Into the shocked, shucked shell
of the hospital at Kunduz, which

for ten days past, in streaming light
(the season’s slant of sun), has spilled

a steaming trail of twisted bricks,
chewed up rails, a grieving mist – the site

where the counted, cradled sick
burned up, the still un-

bordered doctors tell, in beds
the red-blue bombers targeted

and turned to smoking tar –
into the murdered spectacle,

a spangled, metal beast, a tank,
has since arrived, to crinkle

underneath its feet
the very residues of war,

a mounting dust-heap mingled
in its wake, whose quiet particles

now drift and sway,
dissolving in the blue –

as the learned pugilographer
appears in print, enrobed

in points of lucidation, the buff
and cleanly Michael Newton,

who, pending
Pentagon investigation, will clarify

the one un-
answered question thrice

for all concerned:
Who had control, that day,

of base-defensive protocols?
Why include

a hospital
among the targets pre-approved?

And what, he wonders,
happened on the ground?

Feature Image: Kabul, Afghanistan. 5th Nov, 2015. The damaged sign of the Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in Kunduz is displayed at a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, 5 November 2015. A month after the US airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, the aid organisation has repeated calls for an inquiry. PHOTO: MOHAMMAD JAWAD/DPA/Alamy Live News.