Tug Dumbly - Two Girls Play Boko Haram

Two Girls Play Boko Haram

The fault may be mine,

my lack of imagination the hate crime

against a word I can see

only as a crime scene,

a cinema of blood.

But I flinch at that word,

like an oyster under lemon.

It sounds like a slow gas hiss

of dead breath.

It has become an ugly word,    

a dirty word, brutal and blunt,

cruelly curled around the world   

like a bitter peel   

on its spiralling hunt.

Yes you have done your job well

you keepers of the Word,

you have converted me

to an enlightened state

of disgust.

I have come to believe

as believe you must

that your god delights

in watching his prey

lopped with machetes

then posted like pop clips

on the Youtube butchery.

It’s just a word

that Word you enact.

But words come with baggage

strapped to them  

like bombs in fact.

She tried to dash across the road

but she also exploded

the trader said.

Stuff sticks to words,

like spattered flesh

to a market wall.

Unjust to tar all

with this hate crime.

But those pieces of girl

won’t be scraped from my mind

and blinkered though my view

of that Word may be

I fear this is all it wants me to see –

Its colour is black, its number none,

Sliced to ice its limbs are numb,

Ladling waste and lamentation,

A sound of wind hissing through a

Mindscape of pockmarked desolation

a relentless, ululating grief

sirening nothing
but what it seeks to extinguish

as with clockwork heart

of scriptural beat

its inmates from asylums

nightly creep, encrypted to kill

their keeper’s meat.

I saw their dead bodies.

Two girls about 10 years of age …

you only see the plaited hair

and part of the upper torso

the trader said.

You may see more beauty in the Word,

the praying spine of civilization

graceful and curvaceous

as a bejewelled scimitar.

If so, how lucky you are.

But I see cleavers and butchers’ blocks,

a raised proscriptive finger,

in the other hand a Kalashnikov.

I see two little girls, dressed

as bomb dolls, as they go off.

Enjoy Martyrs’ Paradise, thugs,

that rich reward for strapping

your convictions to the chests of children.

Did you say it was a game?

Did they volunteer to play?

Well then, that’s okay.

It’s for them we must give thanks

and pray, as they play,

laughing at the feet of the prophet,  

squealing with glee

as they kick about an infidel’s head

like a soccer ball.

Don’t worry, if one should fall

through a cloud, god’s got a

cupboard of heads.

Who knows, Mr Boko Haram,

maybe you’ll get a postcard of thanks

from those two girls

for sending them, express post, to Paradise.

Wishing you were there.