History keeps shitting on you - Poem by Peauladd Huy
History keeps shitting on you
Dear Father, please protect my mother.
Did she come in harms way before she was killed?
From here: how do I go on saying,
expressing my despair, without you turning
your attention elsewhere? I am quite aware
it is solely my problem. Not yours, nor the next
reader’s. It is expected;
it is human in us to desire something pleasant yet new,
pleasant yet very different
from the same sob-stories – they’re herded to be killed.
It’s just another killing. Another genocide
of a faraway land. I imagine
even today we’d react the same way; stunned,
this can’t happen, then confirmed
and reconfirmed by some news – yes, it did. Yes, it still goes on.
I am like you all. Eventually, I have enough and
I am tired of them
sneaking in
new words to keep me awake night after night,
especially my mother and that lady who survived to tell how
young Khmer Rouge cadets handled the women before
bludgeoning them to death. My mother, my aunts, my friends,
and their sisters and mothers. How can I not care,
not believe my mother
may have been gang-raped before she was killed?
From here: where do I go? What distance
and how many more feet should I add onto
my existing wall, between me and what was said,
between me and that world I once knew
everything cruel was possible.
How do I say she was killed? How do I
tell her grandchildren?
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