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By Kellna Hursle
What remains of childhood when war becomes the world a child knows? In War Child, Kellna Hursle enters a landscape where mothers disappear, bombs interrupt ordinary life and children inherit grief before they are old enough to understand it. Through deliberately fractured language and unsettling images, the poem gives voice to a generation caught inside conflicts they did not create.
Mute days unknown,
life at dawn,
cherubic at grave.
Their druthers, just
for sedates…
are better.
Mother’s carcass spreads
as the night she was
in the labour room.
Dreaded brothers tabled,
names in hands.
Next bombs droppin’,
smoke lingering as rain,
broken hearts.
Screams at all ends.
Mothers gone before
what they triple-valued,
voices unsaid.
“Dear world!” a brother cries.
“Save him, crucify me.”
For they’re waitin’ on
the oppressed coevals,
with piquancy to dissolve.
Yell not next.
Puppets’ words dulcet,
truth, just vitriolic.
— Kellna Hursle
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