Denial's Children
Published in Skipping Stones 2007
Copyright © 2007
Jason Lester Atkins
985 Fleet Drive, #347
Virginia Beach, VA 23454
All Rights Reserved.
Come walk with me down the dark halls of denial,
Strolling past sealed corridor doors hiding centuries of captured history.
Enter with me the common gathering chamber of all nations,
Presided over by our nurtured denial beast with bloody eyes:
Ignoring still, the surrounding soul waves of slaughtered children's cries.
Strolling past a sealed door, forgotten since sixteen fifty-three,
Of "The Lord Protector of the Commonwealth" ordering his roundheads
To slaughter an erring Irish Catholic village: no person spared.
Compassionately sparing others by avoiding the Protector's glance.
Watching children suffering worse, being last to get the lance.
Walk a century more with me past corridor seventeen sixty-three,
Where kindly French colonists, in name of Crown and Cross,
Offered first bounty of bloody scalps from resisting Indian nations
So, civilizing and converting to prevent killing of others.
But, children suffering worse left alive, clinging to scalped mothers.
Turning past the forgotten corridor door marked eighteen sixty-three,
Hearing the invented fables explaining a quicker end to war,
Explaining Sherman's surgically destructive miles across Georgia,
Watching artillery turning towns to smoke plumes in the sky.
Watching hungry, homeless children suffering most, not knowing why.
Turn now to see the horror of nineteen forty-three.
Watching a Nazi nation slaughter six million of its own.
See blood on the crust of the earth, known as Treblinka,
Providing foundations of crematoriums as lasting monuments against a lie.
Watching suffering children's souls lighting this death camp's sulfur sky.
Nurturing still, this awesome beast in two thousand and three,
Providing surgical strikes to cure an ailing mid-east nation,
Killing eighty thousand to rid them of their murderous tyrant,
Leaving sixteen thousand of our young without legs or eyes,
Leaving children suffering worse from dark tongues of denial's lies.
Denial is shape shifter constantly changing into costumes of patriotism.
Holding our I-pods and Blackberrys turned to kinetic soul consciousness,
Wired to flags, ignoring our manipulation by military-industrial complexes,
Ignoring our ancestors' shadow voices pleading their children's crying,
Begging our notice to undo this folded votive of denying.
Children suffering worse, who do the paying and the dying.
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