Sam Collier
Mother of All Bombs
U.S. Drops ‘Mother of All Bombs’ on ISIS Caves in Afghanistan
– New York Times headline, April 13, 2017
If a bomb is an animal to mother
other bombs, its skin and teeth
a mother’s armor, ringing songs
of war, its progeny the feral fiends
who play their screaming games
in someone’s bleak backyard,
this beast must occupy some planet
where humans have invented
everything, where fabricated rain
is cut from glass shards, where trees catch fire
to signal holy truths, where
every time a monarch lies, a species
goes extinct. If bombs are mothers,
birth must be a kind of grim despair,
and tenderness a trick, and growing up
must be like climbing slowly
down into a grave. On this strange world
the generals give names of love
to weapons, built by feeble hands,
that split the very fabric of the air
in someone else’s sky, and burst
the ears of strangers. Space-traveler,
beware: this planet’s jagged gravity
glues some folks to the rocks, while others leap
forever into clouds. Water here is pure and fresh
or laced with heavy metals. The atmosphere
is sweet or else a sour, stinging breath.
Depending where you land, the beasts
might creep around in fur, or fall like death.
Sam Collier is a playwright and poet originally from Washington, D.C. and currently dividing time between Chicago and northern Michigan. Sam’s poems have appeared in Sixfold, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Puritan, Mortar Magazine, Liminal Stories Magazine, Prompt Press, and Guernica. She is the 2017-19 Writer in Residence with the National Writers Series of Traverse City. Sam holds an MFA in playwriting from the University of Iowa, where she was the 2015-16 Provost’s Visiting Writer in playwriting.
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