A Rat's Prodding
A wet patch of wa-ter glints
unusual!
It was my ears that it re-flected,
sand or dust or what-ever it wasn’t no more,
got every-where;
es-pecially bet-ween my grey hairs.
It didn’t matt-er,
I wasn’t thirsty no more.
Scurry-ing off to…
what was it called again?
Wooood.
Yes, wood boards
dis-carded,
they say.
May-be food?
Could be, my family hasn’t eaten
in days.
Hard, scout-ing for food,
in a…waste-land.
That’s what they called it.
Waste-land.
A place where re-sources (another long word for food)
is rarely found.
That means bad, very bad things.
No, horr-ible!
The sun rises,
it’s heat toy-ing with me.
Why must you toy with us?
Why must you pre-ssure us
with your harsh heat,
when we are but meagre rats?
Questions, un-answered ones at that,
those were the ones that made me mad,
or both-ered, as they say.
Eng-lish, the language of hu-mans,
the cause of these per-sisting horrors;
they have fled,
but they have left Eng-lish
here
for us to learn.
Snip-pets from the papers
that tell us the news,
the things that helped me
push sounds out of my mouth
and form them into words.
Now, as I move my hands
and shuffle the re-mainders of this…
thing.
Used to be green,
not green no more;
that’s all I know.
Twist-ing my wrists and hands,
un-washed, but not un-cared for,
Here, there is no hi-erarchy,
just des-perate silence,
as we scrape, and scrape;
families go hungry,
but not dead.
We will sur-vive.
Copyright ©
Nagham Al-Qahtani
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