What’s in a name…

by Mara Buck


Can I comment intelligently on the most recent horrors in the Middle East? Can I not? Do I have the facts? Does anyone?
 
So I will not take the side of this or that religion, this or that ethnicity, this or that government, and I will insist that a rose is a rose is finally a rose.

I instead will take the side of the children, I who am not a mother, never was, the children who have no side, but are the same children on both sides, the same children of the Sudan and of Romania, the same children of Gaza and of Saigon, the same children of the Cherokee and of the slave quarters,

and I will say,

do not show me the dark eyes, further darkened in pain, the small bodies writhing on litters, carried through rubble-strewn streets, limbs bandaged and bloody.

Do not show me.

Do not preach your explanations.

Do not show me, for I will turn my head.

Do not broadcast the percussion of the bombs, for I will not listen, but I will cock my ear to find the birdsong in the blackened trees, that my mind can stay sane.

Do not focus on the blood on the sand, on the body bags heaped at roadside, for I will be elsewhere,

in a place where birds sing and children laugh and peace rises with the dawn.

In a place where a rose is finally a rose.


* * * * *

Mara Buck writes, paints, and rants in a self-constructed hideaway in the Maine woods. Awarded by Changing Skies with a featured reading of her work at the launch of their latest edition, long-listed for Bath Flash Fiction Award, finalist for the Gravity Award, recently short-listed for the Alpine Fellowship. Winner of The Raven Prize, Scottish Arts Club Short Story Prize, three Moon Prizes, F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize, Binnacle International Prize and others, with works in numerous literary magazines and print anthologies. Two novels remain screaming for publication.