Confession
Dedication: For those who died in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but most especially for peaceful protesters murdered by English paratroopers on January 30, 1972, a day subsequently known as Bloody Sunday.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one year since
my last confession. One year since I could speak without sins
on sins, death on death, pain and dark nights and bless me, Father.
The car bomb tearing through the child waiting for bread to feed his dying
mother: I knew he was there—Father, bless me. I poured the nails myself,
knowing they would rip flesh, knowing they would shed blood:
it has been one year since my last confession. It started with stones—
so easy to throw, so easy to run, to strike a blow for freedom.
And then the Paras came.
Because to be Irish is to be less than English; because to be Catholic
is to be less than human. What school did you go to? they ask when
you look for factory work: what school did you go to? And you can just
forget saying Saint Anne’s or Saint John’s or Saint Anybody’s if you want
that job. This place: the poverty, the despair, who would think
you could love it so much? love it so much you could kill for it, die for it,
the city walls and the Bogside, love it with every sinew of your body,
every beat of your heart, love it more than life itself?
And then the Paras came.
They stood on the city walls: did you see them, Father? High above
the people marching in the street. Like birds of prey on high branches,
like birds of prey, they came down at us fast, and they started shooting.
You know the names, Father: shot from behind, crawling to safety,
reaching to help another, shot over and over again, shot in the head,
shot in the back, shot in the heart, bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
Twenty-six people they shot, and not a one of them carrying a gun,
carrying a stick, carrying a bomb. Twenty-six shot, fourteen dead,
mothers grieving putting boys into dark Irish soil: bless me, Father.
And then the Paras came.
Now I carry the guns. Now I make the bombs.
I know the names of the twenty-six. What I don’t know is the name
of that child standing beside the car waiting for bread. It has been one
year since my last confession, one year since I could kneel and speak
without blood on my soul. One year since the Paras came.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned:
and I will do it again.
The Edge Isn’t the End
Dedication: Voyager 2 is a space probe launched in 1977 to study a generational alignment of the farthest planets. It extraordinarily continued to fly after completing its mission, and in 2018 crossed the protective bubble of our solar system and entered the heliopause.
And finally she went through a wall of fire. (I call her she, but in truth we are speaking of a tiny machine built by hand and conversing in an archaic Assembly language, and that fragility and strength make me choose to see her as female.) Almost fifty years ago she traveled past the planetary giants she was tasked to document, sending home her tourist photos—her traveler’s impressions of foreign worlds. But she wasn’t finished… she had her heart set on more. Echoes of ancient starlight, the headiness and high of leaving one place and going to another, into the unknown: and what she found baffled her creators, the scientists, now a different generation than those who’d sent her forth. What she found beyond the heliosphere that protects our small planet was a blurred, fluctuating frontier, a liminal zone, turbulent and filled with noise… What she found was that the edge isn’t the end.
Overlapping zones of plasmic interference and erratic radiation spikes, ghostlike fluctuations of cosmic rays—a place between places, a world between worlds—and still she wrote home from the galactic wild, telling us the boundary is not a sharp border. She looked to the stars and dared to whisper hello into that wilderness.
She carries our stories, etched into a golden disc: the murmurs of earth—images of leaves and waves, of dolphins and trains; the sounds of rock bands and sitars; choral renditions of medieval plainsong; children laughing. She carries them hopefully as she ventures into the worlds beyond the heliopause, collects telemetry and data from plasma waves and magnetic fields and particle composition and energy… and sends it all back to an inconsequential blue planet orbiting a dying star.
Taliban Girl
Dedication: In memory of Ugandan marathon runner Rebecca Cheptegei and of the unnamed junior doctor at RG Kar Medical College; in honor of survivor Gisèle Pelicot; and for all silenced and abused women everywhere.
Yesterday, she lost her voice (it had long been quieted, but they made it official: women cannot sing in the streets, in public, anywhere under the male gaze) because they are too beautiful, too unattainable, too talented, too skilled; we must reduce them to their bodies, so our lust is their fault.
She nurtures her voice now in secret, singing alone the words to an ancient song, one known only to the bright finches in cages at the market.
“The best hijab,” men say, “is to never leave the home”: that alone protects—protects from those same men.
She had a friend once; they sang together in the courtyards of their homes. Her friend has disappeared, and men are angry when asked about her.
(Erased. As if she had never lived. Never walked these streets, never read these books, never had a preference or a thought or a need.)
And in a French village, a husband drugs his wife so 72 of his closest friends can rape her. In an online forum, a photograph is posted with this comment: she looks like she could take a beating. In Uganda, an Olympic athlete is doused with petrol and set alight by her boyfriend. In India, on a lonely nightshift, a young doctor is raped and killed. And in the Congo, over one thousand women are raped every day.
We know the stories.
And we know the truth: in this world, we are all Taliban girls.
After/Thought Literary 