How to write a poem in a time of war

You can't begin just anywhere
it's a wreck
shrapnel in a house
a row of houses
there's a rat scrambling
from light with fleshy
trash in it's mouth
A baby strapped
to it's mother back
cut loose.
Soldiers crawl
the city, the river,
the town, the village,
the bedroom and our kitchen.
They eat everything or burn it.
They kill what they cannot take
they rape what they cannot kill
they take.

Rumours fall like rain, like bombs,
like mothers and fathers tears
swallowed for restless peace,
like sunsets slanting toward
a moonless midnight, like a train
blown free from it's destination,
like a seed fallen were there is no
chance of trees or anyplace for
birds to live.

No start here, deer peer
from the edge of the woods
we used to see woodpeckers
the size of the sun and were
greeted by chicodees and
their morningsongs.
We started to cook outside,
slippery with dew and laughter.
Aahw the smokey sweet sunrises.

We tried to pretend war wasn't
going to happen, 'till they began
building their houses all around us
and demanding more.
The started teaching our childeren
their god's story, a story in which
we'd always be slaves.

No not here, you can't begin here
this is memory shredded because
it is impossible to hold with words
even poetry.

these memories were left here by
the trees, the torn pocket of your
daughter's handsewn dress, the sashe,
the lace, the baby's delicate de-beaded
moccasin stil connected to the foot.

A young man's note of promise to his
beloved. No this is not the best place
to begin. Everyone was asleep despite
the distant bombs, terror had become
the familiar stranger. Our beloved
twingirls curled up in their nightgowns,
next to their father and me.

If we began here, none of us will make it
to the end the poem.
Someone has to make it out alive saying
a grandfather too his grandson, his granddaughter
as he blew his most powerfull song into the
hearts of the childeren.
There it would be hidden from the soldiers
who would take them miles, rivers, mountains,
from their navel core place of the origin story.
He knew one day, far day, the grandchilderen
would return, generations later over slick highways
constructed over old trails, to walls of laws meant
to hamper or destroy, over stones bearing liberaries
of the winds. He sang us back to our homeplace from
which we were stolen, in these smokey cream hills.
Yes begin here.

Joy Harjo