The Stare of a Syrian Boy

I love you
If only my hand could stretch across nations
I would lift you up out of the hills of bodies 
Out of the land of bombs and brokenness 
For I know at least my heart does
And I would offer you a place in my chest
But instead I am here in my perfect four sided box house 
In this perfect four sided box country
Watching you touch your face with your hand, look at your hand covered in blood
And you not knowing that we saw the blood on your face before you did 
That our entire country is watching you at this moment
Watching you be so quiet that at a moment of tragedy and ache
You cannot even scream, you cannot even cry
For the bombshells have dropped all around you, spitting metal under your skin, welding you into hardness 
Or perhaps you think the camera we point at you is a gun 
And that is why you are silent, desensitized to submission
So even if you are far away little boy, I just wanted to say that I love you
And I know times are hard, and you never deserved this 
But you are seen, I see you, I see it all, and I'm here for you
Maybe not sitting beside you, but I am here 
And my darling, I will stand beside you. 

-anna sluder
Link to picture: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3748074/Haunted-stare-bloodied-boy-shames-world-innocents-suffered-civil-war-appears-no-end.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time present time

I stand on my toes, on a box, on top of a wheeled chair to reach the clock high above me, so that I can cut the whiskers of it off with a pair of gardening scissors. But I hear a knock at the door and it is present standing in the way holding a fish, she hands it to me, so I ask her what to do with it, she tells me she knows that everything the birds say really matters to me that she knows that I count and store every breath that the trees release, in an empty peanut butter jar under my bed, but that I could not remember my first cold water, there was no recollection of my first bright moon. She tells me to hold the fish and decide what it means to me in terms of love, so that I will remember when I leave this room, and when I go to sleep, that I once loved something new, and small, and grey, and something that had scales and looked nothing like me, and I didn’t know where it came from or where it would go from there, but that that di
Read more

Green

I stand in the door wanting nothing, but to be a part of the little house we built of medium-rare earth and broken eggshells and wriggly worms, the bedroom walls are green and there is a single thought tactfully pinned to its center. I remember that everything is quieter in green, and to find solace in the silent ecstasy of the earth’s preeminent color, to excavate and toss away all the colors until we reach the obvious, that green is the walls, and green is earth, and earth reclaims buildings slowly over time with moss then ivy, then as the buildings dilapidate and become their own graves in gardens of decay, it swallows them whole, like swamps and quicksand I thought would play a much larger role in my girlhood battles than they did. I want to crawl inside of the little house we built and play in the dirt with the worms, I want to be reclaimed by terra cotta clay and tunnels made by ants, and if I need to, I’ll send a note to the green,
Read more

The Only Future I See

I am afraid to make today my home, I am afraid to buy pillows in the comfort of this moment, so I try to imagine the future, I like to think that it is a road lined with flowers in the colors of my youth, but there are no flowers, I don’t even think that if there is a road, it is lined with commas. When I dare my mind to try to imagine the future, I only see myself, no bills, no house, no job, no person, no plan, just myself standing in a field of baby green ampersands, cutting my hair and then holding a small bird, and the bird doesn’t sing for me,  as I promised I would never ask it to, it just stays alive beside me. So most days we break apart plums with our fingers like stories, and we make each day, each plum our home, and we are perfect and we are whole in this interval of quiet, where the sun is the only one who gets to see. -anna sluder
Read more