Image Source: Postnoon
The New Verse News, a website that publishes “politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues” has just today published the first part of a long poem I have been working on called “Because Fear Now is Never Foreign to Me.” The current events in the poem–the ebola epidemic in Sudan and (as far as I can tell) the first European female suicide bomber, who detonated herself in 2005–are not so current anymore, but I am very happy to see this part of the poem published. Here is an excerpt:
Or sometimes death is a darkness honing in on you,
a Muriel Degauque, whose Roman Catholic life began
in the coal-mining black-country corner of Belgium.
Handpicked, The New York Times suggests,
for the color of her skin
and the way the voice she spoke her language in
could pacify suspicion, Muriel
stepped off the edge of her days
on November 9, 2005 in Baquba Iraq,
a Muslim come to kill American soldiers,
choosing, though no one knows why—
after she exploded herself,
they found her passport and some papers
but no explanation—choosing
the world to come promised to its martyrs
by her new husband’s religion.
I do hope you will click on over to read the rest. (There is more about Ms. Degauque and her husband in later sections of the poem.)
