An Unheard Voice from Iraq, evil echoing in Charleston

I am so sorry and horrified of the recent Charleston murders of those wonderful human beings that joined together to pray and were cut down by evil.

I went to a poetry society meeting today and the reader, editor for Atlanta Review (link at bottom) read some poems from a book of Iraqi poems, Flowers of Flame, Unheard Voices of Iraq. This is just one in the collection.

The pain of this recent Charleston assault is not just a horrible experience in the USA, it is part of a flowing thread of evil in the world when we do not love our fellow man.

Bags of Bones

What luck!
At last she has found his bones.
His skull is also in the bag.
The bag in her hand
Is just like all the other bags
In other shivering hands.
His bones look like thousands of bones
In the mass graveyard.
But his skull is unlike
Any other skull.
Two eyes, two holes-
He saw too much through them.

Two holes for ears
To let music in
The story of this skull
Is his alone.
A nose
That is just an empty gap,
A mouth open
Like an abyss-
It was not like this when he kissed her
There. quietly
Far from this place
With its clatter of skulls. bones and dust.
This place where all our questions are exhumes:
What does it mean...
To give your mother back,
On the occasion of death,
The handful of bones
She offered you
On the occasion of birth?
What does it mean that you depart
Without a death certificate?
The dictator does not give a receipt
When he takes your life.
...His skull, alone, has figured all this out-
How to multiply one death by million
To equal the county.
He is the director of this tragedy,
And as his audience applauds
It shakes the bones,
The bones in the bags,
The full bag in her hand at last.
Her luck. at least a little better
Than her neighbor, who, also,
Still goes on looking
For her bag
Of bones.

Dunya Mikhail

Atlanta Review