Poem: ‘Building with Its Face Blown Off’
Billy Collins, 21 July 2005
How suddenly the private is revealed in a bombed-out city, how the blue and white striped wallpaper
of a second-storey bedroom is now exposed to the lightly falling snow as if the room had answered the explosion
wearing only its striped pyjamas. Some neighbours and soldiers poke around in the rubble below
and stare up at the hanging staircase, the portrait of a grandfather, a door dangling...