"FACINGFACES 2002 - 04" SELECTED POETRY (Part 2)

Remembrance Day

today I remembered
a toddler led up
a Calton close
sweeties shoved into
her four year old hands
while Frank rubbed
his ten year old thing
between her thighs

today I remembered
a child falling asleep
at the age of nine
in the home of
the elderly man
she trusted as a friend
till he forced his fingers
inside her knickers

today I remembered
a teenager out
on a routine date
who found herself
being callously raped
the guy in question
not asking but simply
demanding sex

today I remembered
a young assistant
summoned to attend
a meeting strangely
bereft of associates
just she and her boss
with his most
unbusinesslike agenda

today I remembered
the various women
I've counselled
friends and strangers alike
whose skin and bones
and hearts and minds
have been broken
some beyond repair

today I remembered
the numerous girls
I've worked with
paranoid, anorexic
suicidal weans*
abused and tortured
by grown men
related to them

today I remembered
why I cannot
quell my rage
why I'm so insistent
so fucking in your face
about our right to live
without fear or threat
of sexual violence

today I remembered
and now
I'm reminding you
lest you forget


Remembrance Day = British Commemoration day for the war dead

*weans,Glasgow dialect = children


Buckies, blades and bloody nightmares

the bright
beautiful
creature
you are
resists
creates a nest
of little comfort
amid the shite

surrounds
a fragile self
with tokens
rare memories
hopeful books
on a crooked shelf
yet can't eclipse
the present blight

disappear piles
of soiled clothes
decaying food
festering cans
or the scattered
scraps of words
screaming
in desperate flight

Buckies, blades
and bloody nightmares
consuming all
the bright
and beautiful
creature you are
your story old
as history

repeated

repeated

grasp one
of many
hands held out
by others who have
known your plight
but refused to
yield their lives
to bloody nightmares

Buckies and blades
offer scant relief
no escape
it's easy to run
much harder to hide
the bright
beautiful
creature you are


Buckies = Buckfast, a cheap, strong liquor consumed by troubled teenagers

© Margaret McQuade McAuslan,
Women's Rights Education Newtwork (WREN), Glasgow, Scotland