On the Edge of Damascus - (a photograph)
By Bee
- 1986 reads
The tide heaves forward; no journey, this;
it is the queue for the food aid distribution
point at Yarmouk refugee camp for displaced
Palestinians caught in just one corner
of the Syrian civil war.
Pressing on body to body, wave upon wave
this sea swathes through an apocalyptic corridor
between the war torn buildings - falling
bricks and mortar, concrete dust and metal skeletons
of lives once lived. My heart thuds out a warning
to my eyes as I paste my face somewhere
in the centre of the mass of floating heads
all facing up to God like oxygen starved fish
bubbling silent pleas to the empty sky.
I fear I couldn't do this - I'd rather starve.
But for my children...
What guts and sucks my breath away
is the realisation of what I thought I knew -
that these are people just like us,
not just distant foreigners.
What stabs me to the heart - the smiles and frowns,
the yawns - what makes me want
to spew my shock into my Costa Coffee cup -
vomit back my chocolate muffin as I will myself,
for the sake of decent inhibition, not to cry out loud
in anguish is this question I dare not ask ...
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Comments
The trite answer to your
The trite answer to your question, Bee is obviously, yes, sometime, but you are wanting to know about the soon of this situation. Modern media take us right into the middle of terrible situations, but they can't fathom the complexities of the causes and solutions, the hatreds, the suspicions, the callousness and hardess, the simplistic analyses that ignore some of the facts to try to find quick solutions that would just backfire. Humanly impossible to sort out, but those images are with us, and we can at least pray for individuals we see, or for some we have heard about being targetted or simply caught up in indiscriminate cruelty, and some overruling of bloodshed and tit for tats.
Rhiannon
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Hi Bee,
Hi Bee,
What a powerful poem - and you put the image into words so well.
Jean
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You express it so well in
You express it so well in this poem, Bee - the feelings we all share. And this is what good writing should do: cut through to the beating heart of it all.
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yeh, sometimes whatever we
yeh, sometimes whatever we way sounds trite, poetry can perhaps carry that load. well done.
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Well done on those cherries,
Well done on those cherries, Bee. More than deserved.
An eloquent, and emotive poem, which I can identify with, as will many others.
Tina
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