Child Soldiers
by Isabelle Balot
(translated from the French by John Brown)
Awash in the sun of timeless Africa
The beast-king goes robed in light
A murderous heat stirs in his thigh
As he crouches in the brush or bed of a creek.
In the fire of noon when all seems dead
When everything sleeps in the saffron haze
This warrior lurks in the deep bush grass
A glint at play in his lambent eye.
A sudden surge, and a great, tawny blur
Flashes up and descends in a fantastic bound
Strikes and crushes the prey to the ground,
Kills in one blow of sovereign power.
I know of other kings under African skies
They, of all hope and royalty bereft,
Warriors without helmets, armor or heft,
Go ragged and shoeless, in leathery skin.
Nomads without pity at the road’s bend
– Fatality writ in their dark eye’s depth
As in a crypt where shadows drift –
Come to sow death, grenade in hand.
Behold the child soldier, the murdered child,
Sent in battalions into the sun-scorched light
For diamonds, for ivory, black gold or white!
Pencil in hand, he would sketch only death.
Under stubborn brow and crown of black hair
What memories cling from the days of innocence
– that balm that pours from the flask of infancy –
Form a thread too fine for a mind to retrace.
In combat, there’s nothing can thwart his will;
This more than a child, this man not yet,
Is a god and a king, an unripened adult
Who thinks he is immortal, lives only to kill.
When the combat is over, he sits in ashes;
With a rifle smeared with blood and sweat
He tortures a golden or silvery cricket
Idly crushes a salamander or scarab.
Sprawled on a cartridge sack what does he see
Behind wide open eyes, the sleeping warrior,
What does he hear when he dies under fire,
In the mortar’s blast and the buzzing of flies?
Drugged, drunk, stunned by the sun,
Does he dream of lagoons and a glittering source,
Does his forehead feel a mother’s kiss
Through his final sleep, what images run?
Pardon, Lord, but when this battered Africa
Wants to bind up its wounds and begin to yearn
For peace that sinks deep through its dark domain,
When the altars light up at the hour of prayer,
When peace is promised and even celebrated
I see amidst glittering constellations,
In spite of myself, a lion-god of diamonds
Whose fierce pagan eyes laugh from the dark.
Isabelle Balot ©June 2000