preoccupied
with the ghosts of children,
She
hammers nails into the wall
for improbable angels
they float above
small, intricate, perfect
real girls
each flicker just a moment then
Snuffed out
Because they were not…
Because they were not…
born boys.
“Poem”
would be a
Beautiful name for a child
The kind of child
You must imagine with
Ringlet curls,
Head bent over a book
Or just the small legs dangling
From an open-armed tree
We forget that the word itself means
Create
Like fiction or the epic
Story of lost children
We created, engendered, if you will
Then destroyed
Through shear absence
Of imagination
Imagine them as you will but never
Assume your scepticism will make them
Mythological again
In the smoke of our discarded daughters
/commerce of indifference
Shoots craps in crowded rooms
Sweat-palmed cash for common shame
Summon these
Monsters of righteousness
From this fire we
have made of love.
It has troubled me for some time that in Texas people are legally allowed to kill human beings and use their tiny, defenseless body parts for “science.”
But the two people with the courage to infiltrate and expose this science-fiction level atrocity were indicted by a Harris County grand jury for using fake IDs.
So to recap–fetus harvesting: legal
Fake IDs: a big deal
Or are they?
I spend way too much time listening to Texas teens brag about their fake driver’s licenses to believe that we in Texas are suddenly cracking down on forged driver’s licenses.
In fact, I wish we were.
But in the case against the brave people from The Center for Medical Progress the prosecution is selective, punitive, and political.
In fact, one has to wonder how many of the grand jurors in this case have ever owned or used a fake ID? How many of their children are using them now?
These are far simpler, easier questions to ask than how many Texas mothers have allowed their own children to be carved up, evacuated from their wombs, then bought for “science” while the rest of us hide behind the now meaningless phrase “everything they did was legal.”
In Texas.
I am haunted by an image on a nature program–a young zebra stallion savages a newborn foal to death because the foal was fathered by a predecessor.
We turned the television off, but not before the narrator states that the foal’s “ordeal is over” and will not survive the attack.
I understand the rules of natural videography: don’t obstruct the narrative. I just believe it is time we change the rules for animals and men.
I have little doubt that the film crew could have saved the foal and found a place for it in sanctuary. They simple did not.
We simply do not as well. We avoid conflict with humans even when it is their own children they savage to death.
Abortion is an extreme form of child abuse. Yet we treat it with temerity, speaking gently of “a woman’s right to choose.”
Some choices are unacceptable: cruel, inhumane, deadly.
It would have been humane and appropriate for the men who watched the foal die to intervene on its behalf. They did not because they wanted the narrative, because the paradigm has not been sufficiently challenged.
Time to challenge it.
If we stand by and watch children, anyone be savaged, victimized, or harmed by another and do not intervene, we are culpable.
If we stay quiet in the face of injustice, then we must own this narrative. The crime belongs to all of us unless we are willing to speak up, intervene, challenge the paradigm for our dead and missing children.
Mark Twain said that when he was growing up in a slave state (Missouri) he was never confronted with a single dissenting viewpoint.
Pastors preached the (biblically erroneous) notion that Africans were cursed by God and therefore ought to be slaves.
No one saw any abuse of the slaves.
The slaves kept quiet about their opinion one way or the other.
In the Missouri of Twain’s youth slavery was a de facto good not evil.
A situation he addresses well in Huckleberry Finn.
But it was not true. Slavery was and is an abomination, an aggression against other humans.
What aggressions against humans do you take for granted or even passionately support?
Abortion?
Child sexual abuse?
Human trafficking?
Abortion is legal in the US and many people are passionately supportive of it. But it is a greater evil than slavery.
And while child abuse and human trafficking are illegal, if our government does not enforce their extinction, they will and do flourish in the gap.
So much noise lately–first Mark Ruffalo lends his voice to the pro-abortionist cacophony, then Miley Cyrus lends that and a bunch of other body parts to our monkeys-on-display culture.
I have not and will not watch the Miley display. Poor girl. But I have read the Ruffalo letter and found it remarkably resonant to both situations.
Ruffalo describes his mother’s abortion as
“traumatizing…shameful, and sleazy, and demeaning.”
He is right. All abortion is traumatizing, shameful, sleazy, and demeaning.
There are plenty of places where prostitution is legal, but there is no place on the planet where it is anything but “traumatizing, shameful, sleazy, and demeaning.”
A point Ms. Cyrus has just proved rather infamously on a public stage in front of millions of people.
Abortion, prostitution, and this much publicized burlesque–so much in common, and none of it–none of it–raises the dignity of women.
You can make a great many immoral acts legal–SCOTUS has proved this over the course of the years, but no matter how legal a thing is, if it ever was “traumatizing, shameful, sleazy, and demeaning”…it still is.
When OJ Simpson was on trial for murder I worked in an elementary school in a poor, urban area. Most of my colleagues were African American.
We huddled around the tv at lunch to see what was going on. I remember the day of the verdict. Most of my fellow teachers cheered as though their football team had won.
I wondered–
where was justice?
I really doubt that many of them actually thought Simpson was not guilty. What they thought was
life is not fair for black men in America.
It isn’t.
And now we see it not being fair again. We see justice again faltering–this time the victim is African American and the team cheering is white.
This is not a football game.
It is not right for any of us to be so blinded by the outside of another person’s life that we rejoice in their pain, their murder, or their injustice.
Do not tell me God is in charge in the world today if He is not in charge of your heart.
When we bay for blood, hate, and bottled feces in a world shot through with agony and loss we prove we know nothing about love.
And make no mistake. God is not our little Santa Claus, He is not the captain of the white folk football team.
He is love and He is coming soon, with justice in His strong right arm.
That should make us all pray hard. Because not not one of us is holy.
Not one.
Scattered in the chaos of my house there are pictures of my children–very small, grainy images of each of them when they were smaller than a dollar bill.
Small, but priceless.
So why would requiring a woman to see pictures of her baby be such a big deal?. Because unlike me, some women don’t treasure these reminders of their tiny children.
The truth is that in many countries including the United States sonogram is already a part of the abortion decision. Women wait until the gender of their developing child is evident in the picture and then they terminate the little girl.
Thank you, Ms. Davis, for the graphic reminder of all we are losing.
And the eroding rights of women–especially the really small ones. Here in Texas and all over.
So. I gather from social media there is a trial going on.
Kermit Gosnell and his employees are on trial for a variety of interesting (and thoroughly ghoulish) crimes. What has struck most of us is how quiet this story is. Really? Obama’s taxes are more news-worthy than butchering live babies for profit?
I tracked down one late-breaking article and was amazed by the delicacy of the description. These people were in the business of murdering viable babies and the language is confined to the equivalent of an embroidery lesson. Snip? Snip what, pray tell?
Poor little ones. Even now their squalid murders are treated with a subtle linguistic delicacy. You may be sure their deaths were anything but a sewing lesson.
The article exonerates the employees of this “clinic” by claiming they could not find other jobs. I am positive that was a defense in post-war Europe. What to do when only Auschwitz is hiring?
Carrying Light 