CIGARETTE. COFFEE. COMPUTER-SCREEN.
Cigarette. Coffee. Computer-screen.
Now what? This as it is, no before
or after, nothing peering out like a squid
through its own inky simulacra
as it jets away
like a comet through the stars
that portends nothing but its own escape
though it’s impossible to elude the likenesses.
Illegal white phosporous
letting down its tentacles
like lethal Medusae over Gaza
to cook the skin of the children.
Now that I’ve said that,
show me the child that was saved
in Gaza, Darfur, the Congo.
Words do nothing.
The obscenity of the atrocity
deepens beyond despair
and the desecration of the innocents
is the foreign affair
of unindictable governments
setting fire to a child’s hair.
Are you appalled
or like the rest of the world
are you enthralled
by the chaos of the destroyers
as they colour outside the lines
of a child’s blood,
billions of impotent voyeurs
impaling children on hearts of horn
like kiddie porn?
And treaties are changed
like clean sheets and flags
as the entreaties of the damned
wring tears from the web-cam
that broadcasts the violation live.
Have you ever noticed
how many more cliches
there are for killing
than there are for peace?
And how eloquent and coiffed
and reasonably corrupt
the spindoctors are
who stare into the cameras
like the eyes of peacocks
and weep for the children
with the reservations
of rapacious nations
until they wash the obscene
clean from the lense
prioritizing the issues
make it crystal clear
a child is just a special form
of a blood smear?
Recipe for a country
in the twenty-first century:
First you make a concentration camp.
The Warsaw Ghetto, Sawetto, Gaza. Darfur.
Then you tie a child
like a goat to a stake
and demonize it
with your own sins,
jinxed swastikas
and six-pointed stars,
all the bogus constellations
that fall like white phosphorous
and cherubic gunships, Stukas
and F-16s from the heavens
as if God had spoken
and a child was broken like kindling
crushed like berries and twigs
under your knees
whenever you pray
for a greater good
than the children in your neighbourhood
and hatred gives you an erection
like a missile among your figs
no one suspects
as you assure the watching world
that when you rape the children,
when you dismember them in Gaza
like natural selection
or an upcoming election
you’re practising safe sex.
PATRICK WHITE
