Qian Xi Teng
What should be told about wars in other countries
The woman was one of the million Holocaust stories
in the media canon,
but this time we didn’t even know her name.
But we were told that day
about a Jewish mother sewing up something precious
for her daughter before she
was pushed away by uniformed hands
in another direction.
This was the story:
fished out from a pile of faeces each day
maybe three or four diamonds,
each swallowed a thousand times.
(You don’t need exact numbers for this,
though a diamond less to bribe with
might have meant another story
lost in charred bones and statistics.)
Throughout the war
the girl imagined her mother’s spiky facets
filling her empty belly with light,
whispering an expensive irrational song
of hope.
This is what should be told in classrooms
about wars in other countries,
we should be told to picture
a windowed latrine, solid twinkle-points
ripped from the hem of a dress,
and thin fingers probing in the faint sunlight
for remnants of a love
so distant it was almost obsolete
in the daily horror.
Page(s) 51
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