These two poems are from Tuol Sleng Still, a series of poems relating to the death camp, Tuol Sleng, run by the Khmer Rouge in Phnomh Penh during the seventies. Still is for the photographs taken of inmates before and after their deaths (infants and youngsters included) and it's for 'now',our tacit acceptance of torture and death that seems undimmed no matter how civilised we imagine ourselves to be.
And my child?
He sleeps with barely more
than birth’s darkness in his head.
I watch his famine coming as
surely as a train;
but make no mistake, if you
see fear, it is fear of the void
at the centre of my child’s
screams for food.
All else is contempt for men
who cultivate dreams
where his will never
grow.
**********
Looking away from the
camera, I see
two soldiers hacking a
prisoner’s legs
till he’s on his knees; the
next is waiting
for his shins to explode into
pain.
Ten-year olds screaming
instructions,
angel-faces with AK-47’s;
childhoods manured in
hatred
leaning against
our horizon.
In twelve hours I've seen so much
I'm staring
through it.
A lifetime scratches down that glass;
my mind is overrun with
atrocities.
