Wars today are relentlessly visible. Images of bombed buildings, wounded civilians, destroyed homes, and displaced families circulate continuously across social media feeds, livestreams, and news platforms. Contemporary conflicts are increasingly encountered through visual spectacle. Yet this apparent excess of visibility can also obscure forms of suffering that resist photographic representation. Fear, anticipation, grief, displacement, and emotional rupture are not always fully captured by the camera. As Lilie Chouliaraki argues, repeated exposure to images of suffering can transform violence into consumable spectacle, flattening emotional engagement rather than deepening it. The recent death of the young Iranian poet Parnia Abbasi during Israeli strikes on Tehran illustrates this tension. After Abbasi and her family were killed in June 2025, fragments of her poetry circulated widely online, transforming her verses into collective sites of mourning and remembrance. In this context, poetry emerged not as an alternative to images of war, but as another mode of witnessing violence and loss.

In my recent article in Poetic Imageries: Remembering Through Poetry in Timor-Leste, I conceptualised this through the notion of “poetic imageries”. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work on aesthetics and spectatorship, I argue that poetry produces verbal, sensory, and symbolic images through metaphor, rhythm, repetition, and fragmentation. Poetry does not simply describe suffering. It creates affective scenes that allow readers to imagine and emotionally encounter violence differently.

The concept emerged from my analysis of the prison poetry of Xanana Gusmão, leader of the East Timorese Resistance, during the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste, where much violence remained unphotographable due to censorship and repression. In such contexts, poetry became a form of testimony capable of rendering absence, fear, bodily suffering, and rupture perceptible through language itself. Poetic imageries, therefore, intervene in the politics of visibility by enabling readers to “see” what cannot always be photographed or directly represented.

In one of the verses circulated after her death, Abbasi evokes burning, disappearance, and transformation into smoke, creating an imagery of fragility and dissolution that became especially haunting after the strike that killed........

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