That Awful Truth - Trudie Shannon

You will be the source of a thousand thousand
Heartrending songs and poems.
For your small footprints never graced
Any kind of promised land,
No one opened a welcoming hand to aid you.
You lie dead, in a canvas bag, tied at the neck
Beside the bags that hold your brother and your mummy.
Placed lovingly, agonisingly in the hand dug grave,
By your daddy,
Back in the homeland that you all had fled
That homeland torn apart, destroyed, oozing terror and death
Where the sun bears down
And the bombs and mortars continue to fall
Heavy, toxic, killing rain.
You, one small boy,
One in an excruciating line, of thousands upon thousands,
Yet it is
The image of your one, small, inert body
Lying prone upon the wave lapped sand
That will haunt and layer guilt upon millions.
One small boy, dark haired and beautiful
Fleeing for life but whose life was stolen
Not by bombs, water, the sea
But by wilful blindness and man’s crass inhumanity.

Trudie Shannon