AUSTRALIA ~ The Antipodes

AUSTRALIA ~ The Antipodes
I love a sunburnt country / A land of sweeping plains / Of ragged mountain ranges / Of droughts and flooding rains / I love her far horizons / I love her jewel-sea / Her beauty and her terror / The wide brown land for me / ~ Dorothea Mackellar (1885-1968)

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Saturday, January 19, 2008

Fractured memories of a child soldier

Africa can be a jungle
Of dominoes
Numbered with wars
And shifting sands

~~
Such dominoes
In the hands of a child
Can only be
Dynamite

But a child
One who God hears
An Ishmael
Blasting murder
With murder
Must be on a quest
Out of sync
With conventional
Celestial calendars
~
Ishmael
Can only hear
His God within
Bereft
Of
Namaste
~
And we
Numb
To any
Aethereal Gods
Dare
To judge
And sentence
This child
With the dates
Of an earthly calendar
~~~~~~~~~~
NOTES: In response to the article "Twist in the Tale of a Child Soldier" - "The Australian" - 19.01.08 - ISHMAEL Beah is the former African child soldier turned best-selling author whose account of his time as a killer, driven by the memory of his murdered family, has sold more than 600,000 copies around the world. His searing tale made one television host's "heart hurt"...But a bizarre set of events, sparked by a West Australian mining couple, has revealed flaws in Beah's tale, A Long Way Gone.
The young author, who appeared on Enough Rope with Andrew Denton in July last year and is a UN advocate for war children, appears to have been two years older when he went to war. He would have been not 13 but 15. And instead of him spending two years in the Sierra Leone army, it would have been two or three months.
His story took place during the civil war that ripped Sierra Leone apart between 1991 and 2002. Tens of thousands were massacred, more than a third of the population was displaced and thousands of children were drafted into the rival forces, the government versus the ideologically-driven Revolutionary United Front.
~
~*~ Posted also on HubPages under AuraGem + Posted "Poetry Showcase" - 20.01.08 under AuraGem.

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  • Winter is the fire, simmering lonely in the soul ~ Gemma Wiseman
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