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| France has announced it will ask the international criminal court to investigate possible war crimes committed in Syria's Aleppo. Rebel-held eastern Aleppo city, besieged since early September, has been the focus of an intense aerial bombardment campaign by Russian and Syrian fighter jets. For their part, anti-government fighters are trying to break the siege and connect with other rebel-held territories to the west of Aleppo, Syria's second city. "We do not agree with what Russia is doing, bombarding Aleppo. France is committed as never before to saving the population of Aleppo," Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, told France's Inter radio on Monday. —Al Jazeera, October 11, 2016. Image source: Reuters via Al Jazeera. |
Aleppo wakes to brute victory nonsense,
another corpse called dawn, pale scar of incense.
This week this family had but stones to eat,
and played with rubble. For Syria? Bashar's two cents.
Put a plan in place. They'll kill food convoys.
Outlaw love. Throw feathers, tar on sense.
Dear Russia, count the children killed for one stuffed scarecrow.
What could your heart, dead now, live for or sense?
They wash up on the shores of everywhere
in waves of family—keep out!!—each pair of eyes, ignored, dissents.
Rag-tag fighters with their cobbled guns
blew the superpower's mind to lower sense.
A father plants impossible red roses, hears bombers
play Beethoven overhead: a brief soaring sense.
I shoot this arrow to the deaf-mute smoke
rising from the shattered core of innocence.
Siham Karami lives in what was the path of Hurricane Matthew, and survived. Recent work can be found in such places as Measure, The Comstock Review, Sukoon Magazine, Mezzo Cammin, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Rotary Dial, Right Hand Pointing, Angle Poetry, Think, and the Ghazal Page.