Poem - The Fields
Contents
About
The Fields
The most beautiful lush little field of grass and flowers,
A playground for dancing butterflies.
I see dozens of these petite magical creatures,
Possibly over a hundred,
Different colors,
All of them at peace.
People walk around the grass on boardwalks,
Confused tourists,
None of them smile,
For this lush ground was born of horror.
Human fertilizer.
Flesh
Cloth
Bone
This site is the killing fields in Cambodia,
Where Pol Pot put his own hungry people blindfolded into trucks,
To their resting place here.
Some dug there own graves,
Most were just told to kneel.
Even blindfolded they must have known this was the end,
And many of them may have been relieved by the possibility of brutal murder.
They didn't want to spend money on bullets,
So they used axes and blunt force bats to deliver each blow.
Thousands of them day. Body upon body.
Chemicals to cover up the smell.
Speakers to muffle any screams.
A killing field.
And a single killing tree.
An actual killing tree,
Used to kill babies.
Just one swing and their crying would stop.
And the fucked up part.
It just looks like a pretty tree,
Now covered in colorful decoration to symbolize children.
If you were not told otherwise,
You would chose this place to picnic.
Below the surface however,
They have estimated tens of thousands of bodies.
Thousands of them dug have been dug up,
To confirm what they knew.
Men, women, children babies.
A variety of crude weapons.
Each skull cracked or shattered in some way.
The juxtaposition here,
A tower of skulls beside a picturesque field.
Is a parallel to the S12 prison camp,
Converted from a happy school,
To a place of torture.
Anyone with education, or random suspicion,
Tortured by their own.
Beaten, drowned, bones crushed into false confession.
Barbed wire here. Photos of the victims of all ages.
So many women. Girls. Boys. Scared men.
Put in tiny cages, chained, stepped of dignity and hope.
Those with windows could see outside into the old schoolyard.
Now filled with screams.
Play equipment transformed to torture devices.
Thousands passed through here. Only 11 survived. The rest?
Taken to the killing fields.
Human fertilizer.
There are bodies here. Bodies upon bodies.
How does a country recover from this?
It recovers because it must.
Inspiration
I wrote dec 2018 after seeing the killing fields in Cambodia.
