[Newspoetry] Genocide

[DL Emerick]

Poem I
A million or two people died. 
The count is not exact.
It never is.

No one was left to count.
They shot the people who counted on them,
As friends and neighbors, lovers and families -
Old men and young women, infants all,
And every permutation of these terms.

They shot and yet again overshot them:
Every accent faded, every voice died
Until no one was left to count.

Who would think of counting,
There, in a firestorm of bullets,
Blazing streaks from the hot nozzles,
Ripping asunder man and soul -
Such ways are Over-Man's acts.

Some they buried dead,
Some they buried wounded,
Some were stilled, living, when buried.
Who could count in death's dungeons?
In pits dozed or graves dug,
Who is so numbered,
And numbed to the red
and the blackness of evil?

Poem II
A seed remains, perhaps --
A sole survivor, to tell the tales,
one or two when thousands should be sung.

This discrepancy on the books
Historical Accounting can not fix -
When "fix" lacks any meaning,
Except to refer to corruption.

They lie by counting the dead out,
And by including them, pensively,
In far-ranging estimations --
No kind of counting fixes the dead.

Nothing counts the darkest infinity,
The lies beyond mere moral deficiency.

Reason is corrupted,
Counting for nothing,
When defending any State Secrets
And sealing the lips of the quiet dead --
The dying, the hurt and the mutilated,
The tortured bodies of tormented souls -
All wounds that never heal.
Let them not count as reason history in veils,
Of power gone mad, gone wrong, gone evil.