Sarah Luczaj

I heard you say that all the babies, women and children should be killed

I marvelled at the fact that you had two eyes, a nose and a mouth, like me

I heard you say that you were looking to kill babies but there were none left

so you'd killed a twelve year old girl instead, and I saw you grin, a charming smile

entirely unhooked from anything I would like to call human but you were of course

exceedingly human. I saw you dancing and celebrating and writing names on bombs

and love hearts in childish handwriting, in prime minister's handwriting, I heard you

singing your stupid songs from the mosque speakers and pretending to knock

on the door of a house where everyone is dead, knock knock, who's there?

all in the name of your right

to a sea view. I heard that too.

I saw you put socks on your dead child's feet, press the biscuits you'd left him to buy into his dead hand

I heard the doctors shouting for help back in the days when bombing a hospital was not routine

and there was some pretence that it was done first accidentally then for a reason

and now it's just another way of celebrating a birthday I saw you put cucumber slices on your eyelids

as you detonated the bomb lazily with one hand and I saw that you wanted to be seen

I heard you say you were obstructed in your quest for a pair of lululemon leggings

by a posse of fat unemployed smelly protest tourists shouting for genocide, a small confusion of prepositions

I saw you on television. I saw people bulldozed into the earth. I was seeing images.

I was not really seeing. I was not really seeing it in front of me. I was not there. I could do nothing. But it wasn't the same kind of nothing

that can be done by people starving. Not the kind of nothing that can be done

when your parents and brothers and sisters are dead, when your children are dead when your house is gone when your neighbourhood is gone, when the soldiers try to kill you in the ambulance.

No, not that kind of nothing, at all.