May 1, 2005

To the Iraqi Newborn who has no Eyes B

Victim of Depleted Uranium

How frail and fragile your emaciated body looks

Naked, spread out, tranquil in its hospital crib

Your chaddor-clad mother nowhere to be seen B

Unable to tolerate the sight of what came out

She fled that night, from the hospital and from life

By contrast, how sturdy the weapon that maimed you!

It is the second heaviest metal, twice as dense as lead

It is stable, with a half-life of 4,500,000,000 years

It sharpens itself when it penetrates a hard target

And as it burns, converts itself into an oxide aerosol

You were born in the cradle of a world civilization

At a time when this civilization is just beginning

A major involution. The rich mutilated you because

They want the cheap, flexible, concentrated form

Of energy that lies under the ground of your country

They used this scarce oil to power the machinery

Which helped them mine the uranium that eventually

Mangled you. Having extracted the part they need

To make nuclear weapons, they disposed of the rest

By putting it to thrifty use in Aconventional@ weapons

No apology is adequate for the crime perpetrated

In my name, on you and many others around the globe

A crime so far nameless B for massacre, mass murder

Holocaust, democide, genocide all imply the killing

Of the living. They half-killed you before you lived

The radiation tore through the DNA that was set

To drive your development into a human being

In this sense, the crime is human genome-cide

But the radiation also destroys the DNA of all forms

Of life B plant and animal, marine and terrestrial

This new crime is, therefore, omni-genome-cide

The killing, essentially forever, of all life on earth

There is no greater crime.

References

Photographs, Congenital Deformities:

de Jonge, Hans, Stitching Visie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 2001, at

http://www.web-light.nl/VISIE/extremedeformities.html.

Depleted Uranium:

Hall, Francoise, ADepleted Uranium (DU),@ April 30, 2005, 6 pages.

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