{"id":2273,"date":"2021-04-11T13:50:26","date_gmt":"2021-04-11T13:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/?p=2273"},"modified":"2021-04-11T13:54:36","modified_gmt":"2021-04-11T13:54:36","slug":"the-tanks-are-massing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/?p=2273","title":{"rendered":"The tanks are massing…"},"content":{"rendered":"

on the border with Ukraine and I wonder if it’s snowing there. It’s hailing hard here, a ten-second whiteout with polystyrene balls filling up the guttering, mauling my nascent crabtree blossoms. I could run down to the gravel front yard and cover them with a dustsheet to protect the buds, it’s more than I can do about the tanks. Would that just be crazy, would the neighbours stare out from their casements thinking. who is this loon? But the hail thins and stops in a moment and I don’t break away from reading about the horrors and iniquities in the news. I feel obliged to know about them, some faded sense of duty as a member of the human race but maybe I should concentrate my efforts on the crabtrees and the five kilometer region of influence around my house, my local? And then I reason that I should apply the same care and curiosity to anywhere I go, no matter how far I range, local is wherever I am. I’m reading about a Russian now, Oleg in Cancer Ward<\/em> freed from the clinic and gazing at the apricot tree blossom. He’s fictive, from fifty years back or more and the writer’s seen a different slice of world and life than I have, ever will. But the wonder still rings true and familiar when he stares at the blossoms. And I can imagine him running downstairs to cover his crabtrees in a hail storm. We’re all laced together by invisible threads we thinking things, over cracked continents and down the fluttering centuries.<\/p>\n

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on the border with Ukraine and I wonder if it’s snowing there. It’s hailing hard here, a ten-second whiteout with polystyrene balls filling up the guttering, mauling my nascent crabtree blossoms. I could run down to the gravel front yard and cover them with a dustsheet to protect the buds, it’s more than I can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-henry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2273"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2277,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2273\/revisions\/2277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}