Sunday, April 28, 2019

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.  

 

 



2 comments:

  1. devastating read Tug,
    I wish I could unread as you too, may unsee... although ultimately it's a must if w.e are to learn, teach and perhaps even lead. Thank you...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Jeffree. Yes, to unsee. Maybe we have to see in order to learn to unsee. Or something like that.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.