Flash Animates Hatred (Deborah)

Somewhere, several somewheres
In a back room of a storefront mosque
On an indifferent street of an overfed city
Young men sit at the feet of an elder.

At a sign from him one of the young men jumps up
hunches over a keyboard, beckons others, “come close”.
They move up, knees and buttocks, jockey for view,
curly-bearded, mouths fixed, gaze lifted to a screen.

Two characters perch, blue-beaked in black
Heckel and Jeckel cartoon-like, crow-like
lumpen and large between telephone poles
In a burnt-out third worldish urbanscape.

The young men watch, some eyes narrowing
Others puzzling over the motionless shapes.
They have no point of reference perhaps
for such ugliness in an innocent medium.

One or two of the men--mere boys, fine and lean
look at the elder or at a fellow
As a baby seeks mother’s eye when a stranger smiles.
The elder gruffly brings them back: “Watch!”
And they glom onto the small screen again.

There one angry eye opens above a blue beak
Glares at the pole as if noting an affront.
then a brighter blue flashes, jagged and cruel
hurtling from a fistlike knot at the pole.

Now the flash is a bolt and it bisects the screen
and the fist--clearer now--is a nexus of wire
One more flash and the droll conceit of the scene
is undone in a maelstrom of fabric and flesh


They were fabricked, not feathered,
the ungainly black crow shapes
and the bolt has unveiled them for all eyes to see
the flesh of the mothers, multiparas, bloated white
hanging breasts, paps and stomachs
done with comfort and succor

Done with pleasure and pleasing, no heat given nor taken,
No more vanity and pride, generous, menopausal flesh.
Now they writhe and back-tumble, their cunts nearly split,
nose-beaks flying, mouths agaping, eyes bulging, torn tits.

Without prompting, the cartoon will cut and restart,
cycling through degradation of the hapless veiled women.
Without ceasing or altering, beaks, bolts and black chadors
mix it up in choreography of ruthless pornography.

The elder watches as puzzlement gives way to fury
in the young men he has gathered to mentor and mold.
dead silence on the first, second, half of third viewing
yields to quickening of breath, hot rage then cedes to cold.

Need we wonder, he asks, what the Infidel wishes
For our mothers and daughters, for our sisters and wives?
You see yourselves how they will strip and will ravish
All the flowers of our Islam, all the beauties of our lives


‘’We thought this would ‘’shock you’’, the subject line said,
In the email that bore this so venal amusement.
It came from the Heartlessland,where values are clearer:

men are men, women women, as long as they’re ‘ours’


–Deborah Maier
© 2005 D. Maier All Rights Reserved