First Love

The Year is 1992,
in a make shift  refugee camp,  

there are no watch dogs to watch the dogs.

 

Still born babies are fed to the hungry German shepherds,

as morality is eaten up by inhumanity.

 

“Humanitarian aids” ask for flesh in exchange for food,

I wish we could have gone hungry.

 

An eleven-year old girl is sent by her own father,

to line up for a loaf of dried moldy bread,

so she offers herself to savage beasts,

to make sure her little brother does not die of hunger that night.

Is this asylum from brutality?  

 

The cargo ship that brought them there remains afloat.

Men and women sew their lips together in protest.

But hunger strikes and self imposed silence does not bring them mercy.

Deportees cut their own fingertips off to avoid recognition by fingerprint.

Perhaps, on this earth, purgatory is better than the hell we come from.  

Someone sets himself on fire to incinerate the filth.

My nostrils are coated with that stench.

The NATO guards do not know my name;

they know me by my geographical region number.

I am just a case.

Latitude, altitude degrees.

 

Snow to my ankles; I am given only one pair of boots.

I was taught compassion

by the bedtime stories of the heroic acts of my father and mother

and their dreams for redemption.

No one warned me

that empathy is a foreign and dangerous concept

in a place so wretched

where life is hanging by a thin string.

Once upon a time,

I gave my boots away to my first love.

Her pair of boots was stolen by a coward.

For nine and half hours the sorrow froze in my feet

I became a child again

and could no longer feel the world weigh down on my knees. 

Cklara Moradian © 2011