Terminus
Here is a piece of required reading
at the end of our century
the end of a millennium that began with the crusades
The transcript of an interview
between a Red Cross doctor
and a Muslim girl in Bosnia
twelve years old
who described her rape by men
calling themselves soldiers
different men every night one after the other
six seven eight of them
for a week
while she was chained by the neck
to a bed in her former schoolhouse
where she saw her parents and her brothers
have their throats slit and tongues cut out
where her sister-in-law
nineteen years old and nursing her baby
was also raped night after night
until she dared to beg for water
because her milk had run dry
at which point one of the men
tore the child from her arms
and as if he were “cutting an ear of corn”
(the girl’s words)
lopped off the child’s head
with a hunting knife
tossed it into the mother’s lap
and raped the girl again
slapping her face
smearing it with her nephew’s blood
and then shot the mother
who had begun to shriek
with the head wide-eyed in her lap
shoving the gun into her mouth
and firing twice
All of this recounted to the doctor
in a monotone
a near whisper in a tent
beside an icy river
where the girl had turned up frostbitten
wearing only a soiled slip
her hair yanked out
her teeth broken
All the history you’ve ever read
tells you this is what men do
this is only a sliver of the reflection
of the beast
who is a fixture of human history
and the places you heard of as a boy
that were his latest stalking grounds
Auschwitz Dachau Treblinka
and the names of their dead
and their numberless dead whose names have vanished
each day now find their rolls swelled
with kindred souls
new names new numbers
from towns and villages
that have been scorched from the map
1993 may as well be 1943
and it should be clear now
that the beast in his many guises
the flags and vestments
in which he wraps himself
and the elaborate titles he assumes
can never be outrun
As that girl with the broken teeth
loaded into an ambulance
strapped down on a stretcher
so she wouldn’t claw her own face
will never outrun him
no matter where she goes
solitary or lost in a crowd
the line she follows
however straight or crooked
will always lead her back to that room
like the chamber at the bottom
of Hell in the Koran
where the Zaqqûm tree grows
watered by scalding rains
“bearing fruit like devils’ heads”
In not giving her name
someone has noted at the end
of the transcript that the girl herself
could not or would not recall it
and then describes her as a survivor
Which of course is from the Latin
meaning to live on
to outlive others
I would not have used that word
— Nicholas Christopher.
Christopher is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently On Jupiter Place; seven novels, including Veronica and A Trip to the Stars; and a book about film noir and the American city, Somewhere in the Night. He lives in New York City.
Of “Terminus,” he writes, “I wrote ‘Terminus’ at the time of the Siege of Sarajevo; it was published in the Paris Review and then in my book “5˚” (Penguin). It has been anthologized many times since, most recently in 2021, in Edward Hirsch’s anthology, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. Twenty years ago, when the former leaders of Serbia were being prosecuted for war crimes at the International Criminal Court at the The Hague, one of the prosecutors wrote that the poem was posted on the wall in their offices. That meant a great deal to me.”
Ed. note: The poem was also featured recently on Salon. The war crimes perpetrated by Putin’s Russia in the Uklraine renew the poem’s timeliness.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
