Glare

 Infancy, the colors and blooms, envelopes on a kitchen table, bombs falling outside. Windows rattle and glass shatters, eyesight from a flash was burned, glasses for thee, shells in the orchards, the barns and horses all killed. Fault lines appear, trenches and barbed wire, soldiers on patrol, rivers and red puddles, rubble and wailing, blaring horns and traffic lights flooding over a stone-bridge, gunshots, a mad delight at what people do to one another, sweet and lethal, feet on new ground, a new language, an old mare of an aunt visited one day and asked the girl what she wanted to be when she grew up and she said dead, the stark, bleak world appears again and again and again... and it never changes, it has lightning in the sky, ghost light, you can see it even in blindness, my horses sleep in the winter, that's what they told me when I was little when I couldn't see anything at all, I could barely hear them, I barely speak, I have bad headaches.