Yemen Slaughter August 9, 2018
If one is hungry
And bored
Of watching over Mecca,
What better place
To steal an apple
Than from another country’s orchards,
With fighter jets
Twanged in the sky
Like flying bottle openers,
Diving down
And peeling back a tin can roof
Of a school bus
Loaded with 40 children,
Whose shoulders are all
Strapped
With blue and red back packs
That look like little lunch boxes,
One of them
Surely containing
The sweet temptation
Of the perfect apple.
Mistaken identity, can happen.
So, a few bombs,
True,
Have to remove
The dozens of windows
And deposit
The million shards like razors
To flay the skin of the girls and boys
And, in an attempt to remain civilized
About this,
First cook
With fire and oil
The cheekbones from the skulls
Of the five year olds
Who are still alive,
And it’s important to keep fresh
The liver, tongues and hearts
Shish-kebobbed
With splintered ribs, white as serpents,
And finally, then
There it is,
The well done slab of lamb’s meat
Still clung, red as a beet,
Limbs and noses,
To be stripped
From that one buried back pack
And within it, zipped,
The fine taste of a ripe apple
Polished by mom
As a snack that was packed,
That day,
For school.
Copyright © Robert Trezise Jr. | Year Posted 2018
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