Rwanda by Martha Landman
Image by Tanya Geyser
In a church larger than life - Louise Waller
I drank to drown my pain, but the damned pain learned how to swim‌ - Frida Kahlo
Today I watched your pain contoured by the lead drawing your eyes naked.
I read Kibeho etched in your fibres
Your eyes held mine, staring What you have seen can’t be unseen.
Chilled and immobilised I at once understood the powerless weapons in your hands: silent rubrics
A holocaust denied humanity mass-graved for what we do not know.
Your eyes like internally displaced persons: gorillas united in forest mist.
Years later, impotent nations built Our Lady of Sorrows as if the new church could fill the wrenched souls.
Tunnel Rats by Martha Landman
for Sandy MacGregor
Just a job that had to be done. - Barry Harford
Some might have regarded you as the dregs from other units who saw an opportunity to offload their troublesome charges. You might have thought you volunteered for a Boy Scouts’ camp for grown-ups, but once trained you metamorphosed into the ingenious engineers of 3 Field Troop, perfectly proportioned, a mixture of muscle and slim, each one of you. Mind you, your commander, the arrogant prick, was no shrinking violet either. At home your mothers stopped biting their nails and sighed relief: their brats had been saved by the Army. An incoercible motley crew: Facimus et Frangimus, you make and you break on Vietnamese soil. Irresistible thoughts of encounters with the enemy nearly proved disastrous; in and out of consciousness you crept through the undulating booby-trapped tunnels with headlamps to erase the teargassed darkness and penetrate the Viet Cong eyes that met you around the corner. Rope around ankles for a hasty retraction in a claustrophobic moment, the lost skin on your elbows and knees a worthy trophy for the enemy arms, equipment and documents retrieved. You lived every foetid day as if it were your last. And on the day that Billy’s head was nearly blown off, he had the right to speak
his mind. A fraction of a second can seem like a long time. He did not want to go home in the paper. Truth be told it wasn’t the only time the prescribed two cans per man per day proved inadequate. Elsewhere the hippies dispersed free love and in the Caribbean, Guyana celebrated its independence—even though you would not have cared had you known this. You played hard in the brothels of Bien Hoa, not overly happy with the ominous catchphrase gifts you brought back to camp. And your mothers started biting their nails again for they did not know that the tunnels of the Ho Bo Woods and the swamps of the Plain of Reeds would be laced with booby traps and their brats would be hit with sniper fire. Bullets and napalm bombs exploded in gigantic thunder. Your ears screamed. Not a single molecule of air to breathe, the sense of time lost to the only desire at the point of near lifelessness—to live.
Sandy trained you well and loved you better. Proudly he received the Military Cross—for you and a comrade lost.
Vietnam Ago by Martha Landman ‌ shaped by the vagaries of light and shadow at frozen moments in time - Kathy Reichs
Forty years later the tyranny of forty years ago embraces you in cold night sweats dormant with nostalgia
sad stranger to family and friends the lonely man a mere shell of the old you that, once young, was recruited and vaccinated to be a hero
Though you did not die from the bullet in your leg the hell in your head never goes cold, your life a frozen monument of grief day break’s devil your naked body rises in haggard flesh battles with the demon of self the deadening weight of self-blame
epochs ago the Greeks primed a connexion between art, sport and war only to obscure a luminous conviction there’s nothing romantic about war
whispered conversations in breathless crescendos an upside down man prays for pardon from the bosom of the infinite
resonate in the third ear o, please, miseries—un-wish