REUNION OF THE BROKEN PARTS

(definition of the Arabic word al-jebr, The Times, 9 January, 2015. The quotation from Omar Khayyàm is from verse 51 of his Rubaiyàt)

Social media shifts political correctness.

One minute je suis Charlie swamps the screens,

then someone tweets that Ahmed

was gunned down defending the right

of atheists to ridicule his God.

Does he get seventy-two virgins, too?

Facebook is flooded with homage cartoons:

a snapped pencil sharpens itself, twice.

The moving finger writes, and having writ

Moves on; now, je suis juif

and holocaust memorial day

raises its grizzled head one more.

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia

a blasphemer receives fifty

of his allocated thousand lashes.

Who can find one deity to hold it all together

while his flayed back begins to knit,

and someone posts je suis Bartholemew.

Copyright © 2015. Hannah Stone

Todos los derechos reservados. All rights reserved.

OVERTIME

Pulling the trigger’s the easy part, because

you never know if it’s actually you

or one of the other Brimob officers

who’s firing live rounds. It might be

that I’ve never fired a fatal shot!

We work in a team, five of us to fetch

the prisoner from his isolation cell.

They don’t protest much, though –

they’ve been on death row long enough.

It takes place in the middle of the night.

If it were light enough, maybe you’d see

more than the whites of their eyes.

They can choose to cover their face

before we tie them up.

That’s the worst bit; touching

men who are about to die,

lacing their hands and feet and limbs

to the cross, using thick rope. God has decreed

whether or not they sin. I say to them:

I’m sorry, just doing my job.

It’s extra cash, you see – we’re police officers by day.

We get $100 a time for this, by way of bonus, earn it

for those few moments of brutal intimacy –

the sweaty palms and rapid breathing. We escort them

to a clearing in the jungle.

In the darkness, a torch is shone

onto a target drawn over their hearts.

You could cover it with the palm of your hand.

In my nightmares I am dazzled

by that beam, but stare into it

for as long as I can because when it drops

below my gaze, I know my brothers are taking aim.

Note: Brimob – term given to teams of executioners appointed to carry out the death penalty on drugs-related convicts on the prison island of Nusa Kambangan, Indonesia (Guardian, 7 March 2015)

Copyright © 2015. Hannah Stone

Todos los derechos reservados. All rights reserved.

DETHRONED

On ‘good’ days you stood in a sea of words,

arms powerless to save each wave

from washing further out of reach

the language which was your toolbox at work,

and a weapon in our home.

You railed and swore with fragments still conscripted,

half-laughing when invention replaced memory.

I’d meet you halfway, on the shore of meaning.

Perhaps the ‘bad’ days you have now are preferable,

when your mouth chews on nothing,

and your eyes are empty;

I prompt you in my head:

See, I cannot hold the tide,

not I, even I, with all my force.

Speak for me.

What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.

Copyright © 2014. Hannah Stone

Todos los derechos reservados. All rights reserved

LOSING YOUR HEAD

In the old days there was much smiting.

Old Masters painted burly arms, raised seconds

before the scourge dropped, deadweight

on the un-ribboned back of Christ.

Frescoes froze forever Salome’s sly smile

at her dangling trophy,

the baptizer’s neck spangling

Tuscan hillsides with ruby pigment.

A female Pre-Raphaelite showed the Utopian’s head

lowered by soldiers, in a basket;

no pot of basil for Margaret, but

tearful embalming in soft cloth.

Now, a triumphal jihadist poses

against the concrete of Raqqua’s square;

tweeting: Chillin’ with my homie

Or what’s left of him. Hashtag showed him.

Grey light filters through the chainlink;

he hides his own head from the sun’s eye

and the world’s gaze; not much left

of his humanity.

Copyright © 2014. Hannah Stone

Todos los derechos reservados. All rights reserved