The Body Bags

He lay there:
a naked,scorched and desecrated memory
of denied youthful energy.
His left arm bent and raised
hand opened as though to grasp eternity.
His tortured physical form
gashed from stomach to chest
and black polythene
was the only bed wherein he found his past-death rest.
He lay with a hundred others, or more,
like flotsam thrown upon a terrorist shore:
He was just five or six years old
and his full-life story shall never be told.
At his side another, perhaps a brother,
a teenager cradled in a black plastic womb
though a gymnastics hall had been his doom.
His left leg arched, a poignant pose,
his kneecap white and fully exposed.
His body not so burnt-blackened as the first
perhaps he died from a gunfire burst.
Next to him a contorted shell
partially yellow clad, told of the hell
that some adult, in flash-illuminated seconds
had seen as the terrified screams of children beckoned
for release from the searing agonies
of the bomb-blasts, bullets and fire so merciless .
As yet, they had no name
they waited patiently for someone to claim
allegiance to their once lived, once loved shape:
for soon death would totally draw it's cape
fully over their once beautiful and energised bodies.
They have no tomorrows
nor must they join the agonised sorrows
in the once green field
where the torn-up earth yields
it's space
a place
where so many are already lain
in this grief tortured town called Beslan.

I never knew any of you
...but how I cry
...how I cry
in sadness for what was done to you.

copywright Geoffrey Groom 6th September 2004