Now There Were More of Them

Lynne Knight

They were fleeing through the forest
like the children in the story
only now there were more of them,
children, women, even men,
those too old or maimed to be of use.
The capable men already taken.
Nothing for those remaining in the stripped villages
but to flee the takers,
who would take her if she slipped or lost
her breath though she was
strong, at twenty, strong enough to make it.
The deeper they fled everything blurring together
like the shadows in her terrors or words to the story
her mother once read to her over and over.
The trees closer together now and in the green
blind overhead, birds singing.
She ran. She could hear her breath
like the child at the story: Go on. Go on.
Then images rushing from the dark mesh
of tree trunks. Blood. Men's faces, grimacing
with lust. Legs forced open- women's, girls'.
In the green overhead, the birds never stopped.
They were so loud and various she could not tell
her mother's cries. Her foot caught
in a dirt pocket and she stumbled against
a tree so cool, so still, she embraced it.
Then bent to massage her ankle. How easy
to make the noose, a child could do it,
and the tree so adequate... .

Pure chance, that the photographer found her body
  hanging
in the trackless forest. The shot taken of her back,
to spare us. And now we stare at her
as we once stared into the terror of the forest
opposite to the page we were too young to read
though we had the rhythms by heart,
knew every word like our blood.