Cambodia
Giddy with
the thrill of an unplanned holiday,
I’m in
Phnom Pen with 3 Americans I hardly know
(Coz the
fourth pulled out at the last minute)
We head
straight to tourist attractions
The Killing
Fields
A classroom
where people were tortured
A display
of skulls
And I am gutted
At 21 I
thought I knew things
About horrors
of the world
The Holocaust,
WWII
But here, I
am faced with genocide in my backyard
And I reel
from the shock
To think that when I
was three, toddling and babbling,
People were
being tortured and thrown into pits that turned into mass graves
Two parts
of the world so different, with me oblivious in one till I was 21
And the
other heaving, grieving, screaming in terror
Shelf after
shelf of skulls line the book case
And I
cannot turn away from so 10,000 eyes
Eye sockets
Trained on
me
What
horrors must have this place endured
That their
tourist attractions
Are killing
fields
Classrooms
of torture
And glass
displays of skulls
I see
myself reflected in the glass
The years
telescoping back in whirlpool of memory
Telescoping
the years back to 78, 81,
Dancing,
babbling, gurgling, toddling
When at
that same second
People were
dying
Piling into
mass graves
After being
tortured in a former secondary school classroom
I am going
into teaching soon
Secondary schools
The Polpot.
I never
heard of them till I went there
For a
holiday
A country
so ravaged
That their
tourist spots are
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