IQRA (Read, Educate Yourself)

Cherry

By Ewan

Mon, 02 Jan 2023
  • 378 reads
2 comments
 

Here is a building,

perhaps a school,

maybe a library,

even a university:

Here is a woman outside,

placard held high.

Men with spittle-flecked beards

are wishing for stones:

 

next time they’ll bring them

in bags and pockets.

For now, shrieking

verses will do.

 

Soldiers at the barrier,

barbarians at the gate,

looking outwards

at the beards and the woman.

 

The root letters are the same:

those that can read ignore this,

those that can’t would be inflamed

still more – if they knew.

 

The same.

The same as the book.

The same as the book they shout verses from.

 

They tear the placard in their rage,

they destroy the book

with their interpretation,

even those that read

are not-educated.

 

Certificate PG
Poem
Days Like These
Rant

Comments

Submitted by airyfairy on

Thanks for posting this, because I'm just reduced to incoherent babbling rage when I hear them trying to justify misogyny by twisting Islamic teaching. 

Also, it's a very good poem. 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

What happens to cause people start off by uniting around an idea that grows, adapts to fit more in, then the founder/s pass and the idea becomes strangled in rigid thorn like rules that exclude and divide in ways never imagined at the beginning? Maybe the idea is like molten lava, the further it gets from its source the harder it becomes, till it is a viciously pedantic wall of rock, and behind this the lava builds up  until the crust is split open by a new way of hoping, forged under pressure