The silent clock

Sometimes the chimes are cut short: when the wind shifts, when someone changes their mind, or by a siren during a street quarrel.

Then, one day, you look up and see a clock eyeless and silent, the jagged sky showing through its broken works.

What stopped it? Perhaps a riot; perhaps a bomb thrown during a peace march; or perhaps a precise act of nature, lightning in the night.

The poet sets human destruction and natural destruction side by side, and he calls nature's the precise one: human violence is blind and random.

His calm, quiet tone suggests that such violence happens 'time and time again', and is accepted with quiet regret. That calmness makes the poem more disturbing, not less.