The houses vanish, one by one –
not with a magician’s flourish,
but with glass and flesh undone,
the ordinary gone,
the kitchens and cups and evening prayer.
An entire family –
their laughter stilled –
no longer takes up space
in the world or its memory.
Yet across the waves
voices sharpen in polished rooms,
their faces pink with emphasis:
“There is no absence.
Do not trouble your hard hearts
with the lying rubble.
There is no crime
if the evidence is burned.”
But in the calmed blue after-air
where a thousand shoes outnumber the living,
in children’s hair dusted with mute gray,
in the broken bones that once cradled
languages, lullabies, customs –
there echoes absence
so total
it dislocates Heaven.
Still, they stare through the screen
(as if their gaze could will away
the ruined fathers, the still mother,
the emptiness inside the frame)
and say:
“Trust us.
What you see
Is the trick of the light,
blood that is not blood,
emptiness not empty.”
But we have seen the blackened dawn,
felt the avalanche of names
erased before the world could hold them –
families collapsed into unbeing,
not by accident
but decree.
And our eyes,
cleansed by ash and disbelief,
bear testimony in the chorus:
It happened. It happens.
We will not swallow
their words over
the screams of the silenced.
We are not so blind.
by Bakchos.
– – –
Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, October 2026
