The Leash

The first lines of the poem establish a distinct tone of dread and emphasize the vulnerability of humans living in an uncertain world. “After the birthing of bombs of fork and fear / the frantic automatic weapons unleashed” (Lines 1-2) is no nurturing moment of creation. Human invention—shrapnel bombs, DNS attacks, automatic weapons—has brought violence and pain into the world instead.

The natural world in the poem is at odds with the mechanical and industrial. The sky is “slate metal” (Line 4), the river is “poisoned / orange and acidic” (Lines 6-7). In this nightmare landscape, everyone and everything suffers.

The “crowd holding hands” (Line 3) in what is presumably a moment of peaceful protest or solidarity, is the target of “the spray of bullets” (Line 3). War and gun violence—both fundamentally human threats—destabilize any sense of safety. A “slate metal maw” opening in a “brute sky” is unreasoning, implacable, and hungry. It “swallows only the unsayable in each of us” (Line 5)—the ineffable qualities of what makes us human.

The speaker asks, “what’s left?” (Line 6) after the bloody feast.

The catalog of horrors continues. “Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned / orange and acidic by a coal mine,” (Line 6-7), the speaker says.