BlueIris
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Thu Jan-17-08 12:23 PM
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The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 1/17/08 (warning: very graphic language) |
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"Terminus"
Here is a piece of required reading at the end of our century the end of a millennium that began with the crusades
The transcript of an interview between a Red Cross doctor and a Muslim girl in Bosnia twelve years old who described her rape by men calling themselves soldiers different men every night one after the other six seven eight of them for a week while she was chained by the neck to a bed in her former schoolhouse where she saw her parents and her brothers have their throats slit and tongues cut out where her sister-in-law nineteen years old and nursing her baby was also raped night after night until she dared to beg for water because her milk had run dry at which point one of the men tore the child from her arms and as if he were "cutting an ear of corn" (the girl's words) lopped off the child's head with a hunting knife tossed it into the mother's lap and raped the girl again slapping her face smearing it with her nephew's blood and then shot the mother who had begun to shriek with the head wide-eyed in her lap shoving his gun into her mouth and firing twice
All of this recounted to the doctor in a monotone a near whisper in a tent beside an icy river where the girl had turned up frostbitten wearing only a soiled slip her hair yanked out her teeth broken
All the history you've ever read tells you this is what men do this is only a sliver of the reflection of the beast who is a fixture of human history and the places you heard of as a boy that were his latest stalking grounds Auschwitz Dachau Treblinka and the names of their dead and their numberless dead whose names have vanished each day now find their rolls swelled with kindred souls new names new numbers from towns and villages that have been scorched from the map
1993 may as well be 1943 and it should be clear now that the beast in his many guises the flags and vestments in which he wraps himself and the elaborate titles he assumed can never be outrun
As that girl with the broken teeth loaded into an ambulance strapped down on a stretcher so she wouldn't claw her own face will never outrun him no matter where she goes solitary or lost in a crowd the line she follows however straight or crooked will always lead her back to that room like the chamber at the bottom of Hell in the Koran where the Zaqqum tree grows watered by scalding rains "bearing fruit like devils' heads"
In not giving her name someone has noted at the end of the transcript that the girl herself could not or would not recall it and then describes her as a survivor
Which of course is from the Latin meaning to live on to outlive others
I would not have used that word.
—Nicholas Christopher
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Tuesday Afternoon
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Thu Jan-17-08 12:41 PM
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by god BlueIris.:applause: You've done it again.:yourock: Everyone needs to read this one. Amen.
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BlueIris
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Thu Jan-17-08 12:52 PM
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that this one should be read by many.
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BlueIris
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Thu Jan-17-08 02:30 PM
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Westegg
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Thu Jan-17-08 03:47 PM
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4. I punched the nearest wall at line 10... |
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..and started writing a post about how I can read things like this, while my wife cannot, because I have some lofty, intellectual goal about "understanding" the evil that is possible and how we should explore the extent to which it exists in all of us, and my wife is just putting her head in the sand, etc., etc.
Ah, fuck it. What a liar I am. I didn't read past about line 15. My wife's family escaped from Germany in the '30s and '40s, with the exception of those who didn't escape and were murdered. My family never had to escape from anything.
Okay, I've now read past line 15. I forced myself to. What can I say? Guilty. I hate myself for being a part of it.
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BlueIris
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Thu Jan-17-08 04:05 PM
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5. I'm surprised no one has posted something similar to this yet, Westegg. |
CaliforniaPeggy
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Thu Jan-17-08 04:53 PM
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6. You are NOT guilty of this, even though you are a man... |
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Do not blame yourself for the actions of other, evil men...
You are a good and loving man...
Do not hate yourself for being such a man...
Your goodness provides a counterbalance to evil men...
:hug:
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Westegg
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Thu Jan-17-08 05:57 PM
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7. But you get my confusion, right?... |
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...because at the end of the day, I struggle to discern the ways in which I am different from the "ordinary" men who do evil. Are not war-time atrocities invariably commmited by the ordinary soldier who's fighting for the powers-that-be?
I don't ask that as a question I expect you to answer. This is just the kind of stuff I confound myself with regularly. I am, at least, a decent man, and I suppose I'm not alone among decent men in my daily efforts to fathom why and how the terrible, murderous, shameful things are done. I think I may have a gimpse of the answer. It shames me.
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BlueIris
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Thu Jan-17-08 07:40 PM
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