POETRY: "Through Her Eyes"

“Through Her Eyes”
By Larry Knight

-for the children of conflict

She never knew the reason.

Never knew the cause,
the source of conflagration;
never knew the purpose,
or the cost, or the sacrifice --

she only knew the fear.

She only knew her mother’s warmth,
how her heart raced --

She knew the feel of water,
how sand swirls in the mud,
the scratch of palm fronds against skin,
the burn of the sun on a face.

She knew the sound
of metal slicing through open air,
and branch, and flesh;
the muffled noise of death,
the explosions, the screaming,
the last gasps of life.

Her eyes, too young to focus,
too young to process,
record the violence;
her delicate gaze
encodes the anguish,
captures the misery
until it is part of her,
until it is part of her
memory of a day,
a morning, a year.

She is too young,
too unversed
too infantile to fathom death,
too innocent to grasp man’s need for conquest,
his thirst for sanguinary solutions --

So she stares at a bird in the sky
and marvels at its flight.

(c) 2013 | Larry Knight

Written Feb. 19, 2013