Maryam turned, moving away from the caravans of bulldozers entering Homs.
She could not bear to look upon the the teeth of steel tracks sloshing through puddles of blood, plowing the rubble, burying the mush, coolly covering the fingerprints of criminals.
Maryam beheld the conquering soldiers standing atop piles of shrapnel marked and launched by Syria’s finest artillery officers.
She remained within ear shot to hear the victor’s orator, recite the history of the conquest, carefully spinning suspicion, and casting blame for the devastation onto the vanquished.
The speaker lauded the efforts of esteemed comrades commanding black regiments chasing the last rats still lapping at the edges of the red pools; hieing to the dead catacombs as sanctuaries of salvation.
The barker goads other gangs to commence a surgical search of hospitals to root out wounded insurgents. He suggests they be removed from their recovery beds and thrown atop the piles of refuse where the busy tractors will push the rubble into the far corners of the mind where obfuscation and forgetfulness blissfully anoints unsettled memory.
Alarmed, Maryam breaks for the hospital, to nurse the injured.
She moves with tealth through the broken city’s debris strewn streets.
Maryam eyes the inert concrete, blasted into ghastly shapes, burying secrets, concealing terrible stories of what transpired during the pacification of Baba Amr.
These grotesque gargoyles, sculpted by the mangled hand of a deranged sociopath will hold their silence for only so long.
Dark secrets never live forever.
The distended heaps of jangled rebar pokes through broken chunks of concrete like rib cages picked clean by the jackals of war.
The pulverized concrete forms telling Mandalas giving voice to the stained stones crying the secrets of terrible truths that unmarked graves never keep silent.
Maryam is desperate to find the lost children.
She knows the ungodly conquerors eagerly hunt them.
The subjugators are drunk from the draughts of blood they profanely quaff.
They thirst for more and have set their sight on the children.
The crucifiers kiss the sword to cleanse the insurgent city of its youngest citizens.
Bashar has condemned a generation to death.
He desires to purge Syria of a heinous memory stored in the ripening minds of Homs’ children.
They stand in witness to the ****** of their childhood.
Righteous indignation breeds a long memory nursed by the vanquished as a cherished gift; bestowed to successive generations like a valuable family heirloom; but resentment makes for a monstrous coat of arms vanquishers bequeath to the defeated.
Maryam crosses over the scattered stones incapable of bleeding one more drop of blood.
She hears the howling spirits calling from the broken ruins.
She glimpses the dark silhouettes of fleeting apparitions moving through the upper floors of flame stained buildings.
The ghostly shadows of lost children wander, seeking the rest of an expired future sired by their state sanctioned execution.
Maryam grows anxious as she approaches the hospital.
She arranges her silk scarf. She examines her calloused hands. The lines of her palms are soiled, cakes of dirt have settled under her fingernails; yet sufficient strength remains in her arms to roll away the large stones entombing revelations of love and miracles of deliverance.
The pock marked hospital now in sight, Maryam enters the gate of a ancient graveyard; clambering over burial mounds of her dead ancestors.
She remembered a placard hanging in the hospital’s waiting room.
“Art is long; life is short; opportunity is fleeting; judgment is difficult; experience is deceitful.” Hippocrates.
As Maryam neared the graveyard exit she was overtaken by Syrian soldiers brandishing AK’s.
One stuck a dusty barrel into Maryam’s face while the other tapped the back of her head from behind.
A weeping Maryam knelt before her captors.
She washed the dust from their boots with flowing tears and wiped them clean with her hair; praying for the power of love to once again overcome the stalk of death.
Prostrate and prone Maryam waited to accept the shaft of recrimination through her bleating gums.
If recollection is long in the living, memory is eternal in the dead generations.
The only known cure for the disease of acrimony is the strong balm of love.
Maryam would never again nurse the wounded children of Homs.
Music Selection: Chanticleer & Yvette Flunder There is a Balm in Gilead