The Place that Was
Here are three poems chronicling conflict through the years. The poems are about Iraq, the Occupy Wall Street protest, and every deadly war waged since WW II.
The Place that Was
Children born with
one eye, organs outside
bodies, ogres from my childhood
stories. Someone posted
photos online of secrets they wanted
to keep
hidden, locked away
in shame. Gifts
to the people
from the land of the free
showered from the sky night and day
at a madman’s decree for
sport so long ago. Testing
weapons of mass destruction, skin
melted on the bone, bodies alive
dumped in hospitals with no
medicines. Fallujah.
Best left unsaid. Un-
spoken.
Bombed out for fear the world will
see and be shocked. Legacy of the free
world. Genocide, war crimes, catch phrases to
throw around, human rights,
all these violations by other people
in different places. The global police
observe and take out
criminals in international fora.
The blue helmets look away
uninterested. But who’s there
to police the police?
Hands in Protest
Hands across the world
we are the masses. We protest injustice
that those in high office calls
justice. We weather the spray,
the gas, the beatings by the cops.
We will survive no doubt.
Even the freezing cold that beckons
day by day. We will survive like we
have always done
while the corrupt
will surely fade.
Letter to a Soldier from Another Time
Would you have believed that rifles
and bayonets would give way to
machine guns that rip holes in bodies faster than it took
to load a cannon and fire? Would you have believed
that flares lighting the sky,
gas that ate up flesh, turning your sight to water,
the stench of rotting, rotting, would one day
be replaced by missiles
screaming obscenities through the skies
to land in other people’s homes,
in kitchens as they cooked,
anywhere, everywhere,
turning the children in their wombs
into monsters no one wants to look at?
White phosphorous devouring bodies alive like
vultures black as the night.
Would you have believed soldiers
sitting in trenches shivering
in fear of an enemy to pounce would be replaced
by drones, unmanned, firing on targets,
anything that moved,
non-discriminating it could be the enemy,
a child going to school, a woman doing the washing,
an old man walking down the road.
Anything and
everything that moved.
How cruel is the world that invents misery
in the hundreds, how insignificant lives,
how selfish is man that he profits from war
fills his coffers from the sale of weapons, destroying
lives because he doesn’t like what they say, or do
while somewhere in a land he doesn’t care about
someone is busy filling graves faster than he can dig.
War is fought not in open battlefields,
in pits and trenches like yore but from faraway
places in air conditioned comfort. What would you
have said had you known? Would you have
been as appalled as you were then?
Shirani Rajapakse is a Sri Lankan poet and short story writer