Ghouta: Rivers of Blood …




Blood flowing,

soaking the streets,

oozing out of stomachs, shrapnel piercing an 11 year old daughter,

where a few metres from her, a father lies dead,

his deceased eyes fixed on her mother,

who is cold as stone a few feet away.


Who killed this family, these parents and their daughter in a market place where they went to buy some tomatoes?


Who spilled these rivers of blood, these crimson streams flowing out of human veins,

who opened these floodgates,

of horror,

of grotesque violence,

raining down metal, splintering the flesh, of the living,

maiming, savaging, blowing out candles,

of life in mere moments.


These deliverers of death come from the skies,

they sneak through alleys in the middle of the night,

they are as human as you and I.


They merely “follow orders”, that same refrain heard through epochs of war and death and the callous disregard for the life of a human-being.


The war machine runs ever so smoothly,

well-oiled by vested interests,

fed by drummed up narrow nationalistic fervour,

whipped up by the politicians, the leaders, the religious zealots, the economy of war.


The daughter will bleed some more, the father and many fathers, the mothers and countless other mothers will continue to be shredded into dead meat,

unless you and I,

us and them,

all of us we who lay claim to be human,

until we say no,

no more the arbitrary bloodshed,

no more mothers tears shed,

no more looking away, betraying, desecrating,


the memory of the numberless dead.





(dedicated to the people of Ghouta, and the many ghoutas where human blood is shed in the name of corporate greed, religious fanaticism, nationalistic hubris, and hate)