ETHIOPIAN DÉJÀ VU

by Phyllis Wax

Despite mass starvation occurring in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray, senior international aid officials are tiptoeing around declaring a famine nearly a year after the civil war erupted. Photo: This is one of the malnourished children being treated at Ayder Hospital this week —BBC, October 16, 2021

We’ve seen them before,                             

living skeletons,

bones like knobby sticks,

 

carrying children too weak

to brush flies

from their faces,

 

so hungry

they’ve been eating

leaves.

 

A hooded figure

strides among them,

his sharp scythe ready.

 

Trucks with life-

saving food and medicine

have been blocked.

 

Our feet seem stuck            

in concrete. 

Social issues are a major focus of Milwaukee poet Phyllis Wax. Her work has appeared on The New Verse News in the past, as well as in numerous other journals and anthologies, both online and in print.

A WOMAN IN TIGRAY

by Sarah Mackey Kirby

Britain's Channel 4 recently aired a devastating report on these atrocities. One survivor recounted a harrowing 10-day ordeal to the network during which she said she and five other women were gang-raped by Eritrean soldiers. She said the troops joked and took photos as they injected her with a drug, tied her to a rock, stripped, stabbed and raped repeatedly her. Doctors who've treated Tigrayan women have said one woman's vagina was stuffed with nails, stones and plastic. —CBS

is filled with stones,

nails. By her captors.

If she is not human,

if she must be bloodline-cleansed

from existence,

then why does crying matter.

 

The sun rises all over the world

as if it doesn’t know.

And sets apricot embers

each evening.

In darkness, a woman in Tigray

is filled with stones.

Filled with soldiers.

Alone below Orion’s belt,

sharp in the night sky,

glowing fire

three stars in a row.

Sarah Mackey Kirby's first poetry collection The Taste of Your Music (Impspired) will be published in May 2021. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Chiron Review, Connecticut River Review, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere. She and her husband live in Louisville, Kentucky.