Carol Ann Duffy — Loud Carol Ann Duffy

(Epigraph:) Parents with mutilated children have been turned away from the empty hospital and told to hire smugglers to take them across the border to Quetta, a Pakistani frontier city at least six hours away by car. (Afghanistan, 28 October 2001) (Poem:) The News had often made her shout, but one day her voice ripped out of her throat like a firework, with a terrible sulphurous crack that made her jump, a flash of light in the dark Now she was loud. Before, she’d been easily led, one of the crowd, joined in with the national whoop for the winning goal, the boos for the bent MP, the cheer for the royal kiss on the balcony. Not any more. Now she could roar. She practiced alone at home, found she could call abroad without using the phone, could sing like an orchestra in the bath, could yawn like thunder watching TV. She switched to the News. It was all about Muslims, Christians, Jews. Then her scream was a huge bird that flew away into the dark; each vast wing a shriek, awful to hear, the beak the sickening hiss of a thrown spear. She stayed up there all night, in the wind and rain, wailing, Uttering lightning. Down she was pure sound, rumbling like an avalanche. She bit radios, swallowed them, gargled their News, till the word were- ran into a church and sprayed the congregation with bullets no one had claimed- gibberish, crap in the cave of her tongue Her voice stomped through the city, shouting the odds, shaking the bells, awake in their towers. She yelled through the countryside, swelling the rivers, felling the woods. She put out to sea, screeching and bellowing, spewing brine She bawled at the moon and it span away into space. She hollered into the dark where fighters planes buzzed at her face. She howled till every noise in the world sang to the tip of her tongue: the shriek of a bomb, the bang of a gun, The prayers of the priest, the pad of the feet in the mosque, the casual rip of the post, the mothers’ sobs, the thump of the drop, the President’s cough, the screams of the children cowering under their pews, loud, loud, louder, the News.