Adam’s story
warning: adult material
How I came upon Adam, the first adopted.
The rain fell in sheets through the day.
At night the thin canvas drenched, ripped.
Adam could not sleep, the shifting clay
Of his dreams turned to terror,
And curled into my curve he lay
Shivering, reliving the horror;
The earth watered by blood, his parents’ –
Skin stripped, wrapped in their own entrails,
Hanging a bait for the ancients,
Vultures wheeling, wings wind filled sails,
Waiting for the crossing, death’s sigh
To release the tormented soul’s I –
I found him lashed to a barbed post,
A note nailed proclaiming his life
Had sprung not from the pure, the host
Living inside The Book, its pages rife
With judgements for those people lost,
Their fate delivered with a dull knife.
I carried him back to my torn tent
Pegged among hundreds, all innocent,
Their stories twittering the internet
A moment’s distraction, briefly
Engaging, killed immediately
By posts of puppies which clearly
Matter more than an orphaned boy.
Above us skies weep, breasts broken.
He rests folded into my folds.
I have to say something about this poem, which as you say is autobiographical. Skinning anything alive is a process not fast enough to kill almost everyone in a village and go to another and continue the killing. Partly skinning may be fast enough such as scalping. Of course I have questions, this skinning alive doesn’t happen often, where did all these happen? What was the reason for such a fanatic hatred towards the inhabitants of this village or town? Why did they still live near such fanatic hordes without effective self-defence? Who trained these hordes? Who left the people… Read more »
Ifyouplease, you raise some very good questions. There has to be a debate on what is happening in the world, and in this case the forgotten war in Syria, which was in vogue for a while because there was a perceived threat to the West – and let’s forget about the local population because their lives are worth only a minute % of those from the West. Don’t these people deserve a “proper break from the atrocities” too? Or is that a far fetched dream because they deserve everything that happens to them through the sheer fact that they are… Read more »
Syria. As you know I am Greek and my country this place is the crossroad, there are thousands of stories and the fight hasn’t stopped, stories from the Ottoman occupation and prior to that the Crusades which brought at least as horrendous atrocities as the things you describe here. But what I ask right now is should we all grow with such stories and learn to listen to them, as conversations with our folks, tv or radio and newspapers and so on? I am sure you can imagine this scenario. You wake up make yourself a cup of coffee turn… Read more »
to give you an example which is autobiographical too, I used to live in fear more than now, I still live in fear I try to control it and rationalize it, analyze it, then I met one of the older cousins of my husband, a woman, back then in her late thirties and she was the celibate cousin, the fat cousin, though you could see she was very beautiful, if she tried a bit to lose weight and all the things we women (mostly) do and she is also bright, but failed to finish highschool, or something like that and… Read more »
I remember you saying “we are all complicit” – there are many of us working for change. This is a bloody reminder of the evils humans visit upon each other, but do not lose hope.
Everyone is complicit; no one can look at the events unfolding outside their borders and say it has nothing to do with them.