Name Change

"These youth love death as you love life."
—Osama bin Laden, 1996

At the beginning
it was a sense of awe
at the individual's action:
a hero, perhaps,
to give up their own life
for—what? political gain,
religious devotion, duty,
history—the glory
of an afterlife? Certainly
the emphasis was on suicide,
a voluntary giving up of body
and soul, to a cause
(supposedly) beyond the single
life, the unique fingerprint
of someone's existence
here on planet earth.

Now, as the deaths grow
in number, innocent persons
blown to pieces, injured
people suffering, sirens
and rubble in country
after country, victims carried
away on stretchers, blood
on city streets, in places
of worship or shopping or transport,
hotels or nightclubs, airplanes—
as time goes on, the emphasis
shifts to bomber,    
an operative meant
solely to blow up, blast
apart, detonate and destroy.

Finally there has come
to be a change of name,
homicide bomber, the hero
become a murderer,
the physical body
no longer flesh, bone, spirit

but now a form of arms,
an object designed
to inflict bodily harm;
"the beauty of weapons"
no longer a metaphor
but a deadly reality:
the radiance of a unique soul,
no longer human, but weaponry,
to murder, maim and kill.

Copyright by Carolyn Zonailo: www.carolynzonailo.com, 2009