Ambassador For Conscience

Poetry is an independent ambassador for conscience: it answers to no one, it crosses borders without a
passport, and it speaks the truth.      – Ellen Hinsey

It is always the children, blameless
but suffered to lose, no matter the victor
in war. Children, turned feral
as the world explodes in jagged lessons:
how to cower and slink, how to sleep,
without sleep, alert always for disaster
and nightmare, how to cry without sound,
how to see without seeing, the flavors of pain–
tastes of tears and blood, acids of grief,
how to seal it away like a pearl–
black-nacred, lumpy, that grows
through the years, and is passed on
through generations, until some descendant
dissolves it all into words: makes a bitter drink,
distills a poem, a plea to the world, a plea
to conscience for peace.

.

Eleven Million Missing

Numbers do not count the smoke of  dowry death,
lick of flame against a young girl’s skin,
the searing cramp of pesticide slipped into tea
when the marriage price was not enough.

They cannot staunch the blood when a brother’s knife
slices out the honor of  family name, will not
shield a girl in Darfur, Bosnia or Gaza from rape
and rape and rape when rape is an instrument of war.

11 million missing in the world: uncounted,
dead or never born.  In Nepal fifty thousand
girls aborted in a year: the ultrasound predicts
a daughter who will leave, taking family wealth.

Daughters wrapped in veils and locked
behind high walls, married young to old men
who will break them. Daughters sold to weave
or sew or clean; sold to be chained to beds

where men pay to use them again and again..
They are never counted when the census taker comes.
In America the clan of Doe larger every year:
Janes and Baby Girl Does in hundreds.

Sometimes one of the missing reappears,
stumbling back into life as a marvel:
a Jaycee, an Elizabeth, a Michelle.
Re-named, a girl again is counted–remade

a parable for tough or luck or faith, so people
can believe that random evil cannot win.
But I imagine vast plains of ash, endless needle rain,
as eleven million huddle, wait for someone to call them home.  

.

Catharine Clark-Sayles has two books published with Tebot Bach Press, One Breath and Lifeboat. A chapbook, “Brats”, about her military brat childhood was published by Finishing Line Press and her latest book, The Telling, The Listening was published by Saint Julian Press in October 2023.

I did a workshop with Jane Miller last summer on war and poetry which is when I wrote the first poem. Given that humans are hard-wired to protect children, the numbers being destroyed physically and emotionally in Ukraine and Gaza speaks to how far humanity has fallen. The second poem is a little older and came up as I tried to imagine the statistic that says we know the ratio of male to female births and the population of the world and there is a shortage in the numbers of eleven million women. It still is nearly incomprehensible to me. In a sense there is a war against females.