What Can Poetry Do About This?

By Ouyang Yu
                                                                  by Ouyang Yu


“They tied the husband up on the second floor{mosimag
and stripped his wife naked in front of him
both of them in their early thirties
they then gang raped the wife
who was three months into her pregnancy
after that
they threw the wife, with nothing on
out the open window
who landed in the middle of the street below
and died instantly among the spectators
the husband went insane afterwards”
the Chinese from Indonesia told me the story
with not a single adjective
that he saw with his own eyes
on 14 May 1998
the day his shop was pillaged in Jakarta
and the day he saw it all happen as he was standing in the dead lane
with an iron bar in his hands
his wife and daughters locked inside his house
his eyes dry
his voice wet with tears
(from: http://www.peril.com.au/edition3/solitude )

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