Peter Street

BOMB DAMAGE

Something was itching my eyes to stare
over at the machines.

Only I seemed to hear the bleeping
yet my whole family was standing there
and everyone who had ever lived,

the whole universe even, all screaming
not to look. Yet the bleeping seemed

to bounce off every childhood picture
and get-well card
in the Zagreb hospital:
like a ball to my feet.

Then I made my mistake
and looked at a face,
a kind of no-face with holes for eyes
nose, mouth,

legs missing from the knees down
still stuck to all those bits of shrapnel
somewhere, which banged her life apart.
A little girl, bandaged

in mummy, almost pretty.
Some nurse had taken an age
getting each lap perfect
so proud that when we look

we might still see a person,
someone whole.

* * *

ZAGREB CAMP

Our wagons rock, jerk
through lines of pot-holes
a foot deep in a cinder path
where children walk barefoot.

It's a ride down
into something I don't understand;
a dog shelter where at least
one hundred families live,

who beg out their hands
and cough loud barking coughs.

Naked kids swapping boredom
for disease under a tap
that's splashing cold silver
into mud pies.

Our interpreter - an English Lit. student,
his family wiped out,
is talking of Shelley in a waste land
such as Eliot never saw.

The town was very busy,
Youngsters gathered in the street.
They didn't moderate their language,
It was just a place to meet.

Peter Street is the author of five published poetry collections and recipient of a Royal Literary Fund Grant. He went to the Croat/Bosnian conflict as a war poet proving disabled people can. He has had multiple disabilities from a young age. Book two of his memoirs is almost finished.