The War Photographer

She came in on a press pass with a camera at her chest,
and the soldiers watched her move through it like someone past the rest,
she framed the broken buildings and the children at the wall,
and she pressed the shutter on the things that no one wants to call.

There is an argument about the ethics of the photograph,
whether bearing witness is a kind of aftermath,
but she keeps a certain distance and the lens becomes the space,
between the tragedy and what the editors have to face.

The war photographer sees what the rest of us cannot bear,
the war photographer carries it all back in a square,
a frame of silver and of shadow, forty millimeters wide,
the war photographer brings the distant inside,
and the paper runs the image and the people shake their head,
and the war photographer goes back to photograph the dead,
because someone has to witness it and someone has to show,
what the flags and the speeches leave out of the flow.

I asked her once if she could sleep after a day out in the field,
she said sleep was just a thing you did
when nothing else was real,
she said the camera is a contract that she signed
when she was young,
to carry back the image that the living left undone.

She ships the hard drive on the transport
and she takes the next flight in,
and I think about the kind of weight that kind of work puts in,
the war photographer sees it all and frames it for the rest,
and leaves a piece of every war inside her chest.