by Cherryl Floyd-Miller

Created on: April 28, 2008

1.
Before Corporal Bradowick, fifth company, third platoon,
unleashed his burn of bullets into a Baghdad father's neck
the eyes he saw looking back at him were his own.

2.
Women in Darfur know how to stand
against guns and assailants to gather food.
Janjaweed soldiers pillage private flesh,
extortion for morsels they will drop
onto their children's tongues.
The body, they say, will do what must be done.

3.
A Rwandan child soldier's fingers itch
for gashes, night-sky firecrackers or blood.
The beat of gunfire is how he learned to say his name.

4.
A seven-year-old Bahrain girl in a soiled dress,
broken ceramic angel with bits of two-week-old bread
tied into the skirt of her cracked-face doll: ka-pow is the sound
of an old car backfiring. Ka-boom is the sound of a bomb.

5.
At fifteen, the fourth sisterwife pushes her second child
into a first breath. She has a strange craving
for red licorice, electric toys, an open mall
of squealing dollars and God.

6.
A camera does not know to ask a soldier
what of his soul he leaves at war.

A news lens cannot ask a woman
how much loss is too much forfeit
to stave off hunger in her children.

A journalist cannot tell the difference
between a daisy cutter and an old car.

7.
Whose child is this who holds a gun?

Whose trigger finger is irreversibly
crooked for the cold metal
of a ruthless gun?

Who made him itch for bone and gore?

Who gave him less
to make us all ache for more?

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