History keeps shitting on you - Poem by Peauladd Huy

History keeps shitting on you

Dear Father, please protect my mother.

Did she come in harms way before she was killed?

From here: how do I go on saying,

expressing my despair, without you turning

your attention elsewhere? I am quite aware

it is solely my problem. Not yours, nor the next

reader’s. It is expected;

it is human in us to desire something pleasant yet new,

pleasant yet very different

from the same sob-stories – they’re herded to be killed.

It’s just another killing. Another genocide

of a faraway land. I imagine

even today we’d react the same way; stunned,

this can’t happen, then confirmed

and reconfirmed by some news – yes, it did. Yes, it still goes on.

I am like you all. Eventually, I have enough and

I am tired of them

sneaking in

new words to keep me awake night after night,

especially my mother and that lady who survived to tell how

young Khmer Rouge cadets handled the women before

bludgeoning them to death. My mother, my aunts, my friends,

and their sisters and mothers. How can I not care,

not believe my mother

may have been gang-raped before she was killed?

From here: where do I go? What distance

and how many more feet should I add onto

my existing wall, between me and what was said,

between me and that world I once knew

everything cruel was possible.

How do I say she was killed? How do I

tell her grandchildren?