Qana Tribute

The Child Dancing

there's no way I'm going to write about
the child dancing in the Warsaw ghetto
in his body of rags

there were only two corpses
on the pavement that day
and the child I will not write about
had a face as pale and trusting
as the moon

(so did
the boy with a green belly full of dirt
lying by the roadside
in a novel of Kazantzakis

and the small girl T.E. Lawrence wrote about
whom they found after the Turkish massacre
with one shoulder chopped off, crying:
'dont hurt me, Baba!')

I don't feel like slandering them with poetry.

the child who danced
in the Warsaw ghetto
to the music no one else could hear
had moon-eyes, no
green horror and no fear
but something worse

a simple desire to please
the people who stayed
to watch him shuffle back and forth,
his feet wrapped in the newspapers
of another ordinary day

Gwendolyn MacEwen