Rape Of A City; Death Of A Soul Poem by Stephanie Collins

It is heartbreaking to be eleven years old
and hear your mother screaming for help
in the middle of the night.
It is disheartening when you go to see what has happened
and you see a man who is not your father
raping your mother in her own house.
And it hurts you deep down inside
when you know you’re too young to help,
too old to sit in a corner and cry,
too confused to know how to feel,
yet too naї ve to understand any of it.

So
at first I ran back to my room
but couldn’t stand to hear my mother’s pain
so I ran out, looking for help
but finding none.

I ran to the house of my friend
but it turned out
they had met with a worse fate.
The whole family was slaughtered
their blood staining the floor,
the furniture,
the ceiling.
The only living thing in the place
was a man dressed the same way
as the man at my house.

I wandered the streets
in search of something comforting.
But my only discovery
was that these cruel men
had taken over the city.
Women lay in the streets in piles
their bodies mutilated beyond imagination.
A pile of heads lay in the middle of the street;
a man was hanging some on a clothesline.
What was I to do?
Our city, our prized Nanjing
was being ransacked
by an unknown enemy.
Surely, we had done nothing
to deserve this fate?

Turning to go back to my house
where this nightmare had first began
I hoped against all hopes
that this was fiction.
But arrival into the house was demoralizing;
I no longer heard the cries
but somehow knew
that was not a good sign.

Mother was dead
her insides spilled out on the bed
the floor
and splattered onto the ceiling.
And for what?
An enemy’s revenge for what?
International glory?
We were never the same;
I was never the same.
We had been violated;
and the world knew not of it.

(February/March 2009)