Collateral Damage

by

Frank Valentyn

She stands truncated
abbreviated by the world
that whirls madly past her
two years old and smiling bravely
they hacked her arms off at the elbow
stumped by political innuendo

Two brave years old
waving her frustration, brightly
at the camera, shyly craving
they allowed retention of her legs
in oversight or specious altruism
where other such angering members
rot on some exhausted road
stepped over by the burdened bold
circled, mis-aimed by the hobbling
unseeing, and ancient children
or float downriver, gently bobbing
votively past tranquil slaughterlands
attracting slow, patient lizards

Behind her, rows and trains
of wheelchaired, crutched, carried and braced
are said to number two million
some grinning prosthetically
understand forgotten horror
reborn daily maimed
in endless continuation
insinuation by attenuation
imputation by amputation
intimidation by diminution

She is, as Plato might have said
a political animal, freshly trained observer
dreamt in her tremble-questing hands, unsure
ever absently immature
may never hold the toys of freedom
or guide the joys of her own child’s noise
except in approximation
but her mouth they have not taken
or her growing heart and mind
kind, in dark limpidity, those inquiring eyes
that saw insanity and superior poison
of the intolerable hacked by the intolerant
fleeting appeals of the fleeing and kneeling
seeping tranquilly into pacific slaughterlands
and sometime might seed inner healing
reflecting distantly trickling hope, unquenchable
ever youthful in absent hands

(From a TV documentary on war victims in Sierra Leone)

NEXT?
Why don't you look at Where are They Now?
by: Joyce Hemsley
from: Sunderland, England, UK

To visit all of Frank Valentyn's poems, click HERE

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