‘Come.

’That is all the boy would say.

To get the foreigner's attention.

How awful it was.

That he knew no other word of communication.

 

His earliest years were normal.

Peaceful,

Calm,

Good.

 

Yet,

Before he was old enough to attend school,

Evil came

With its black flags.

And black guns

And black beards.

And black hearts. 

 

Evil took all the good in his village,

Including him.

They took him from his mother and father,

And left him an orphan,

Though their religion claimed care and peace for children.

They did not see him as a child,

Only is a slave.

 

For years,

He was passed around,

Like a soccer ball,

From one fighter to another.

They used him for money

To get more for free,

Exploiting his vulnerability.

 

Then,

After being beaten,

He met her,

The woman who he thought of as his mother.

 

She was from a different world,

A world of peace,

Prosperity,

Goodness,

And hope.

 

Following the road of trickery willingly

Led her into the lion's den.

She slept with vipers.

She lied with dogs.

For that,

She would be bitten,

And she would pay the price.

 

He lived with her husband,

An evil man,

And her children.

She treated him like a son,

And her son thought of him as a brother.

They played as much as they could

As the city crumbled around them.

 

Yet,

Not all was rosey

By any means.

The child's innocence,

Like Humpty Dumpty Having a great fall,

Was forever destroyed.

He saw people killed

More than once.

A gun was put to her head,

So that they could take her son and him

To be put in a video.

 

There were also two others,

Teenagers,

Who were like him,

Who were from where he was.

They were not daughters,

Not to her husband,

Who did not treat them as though he were their father.

He did the thing no man should do

To any woman, 

Neither old nor new.

 

His wife treated them nicely,

Taking them with her to shop and eat,

And making sure they memorized the names of their family.

Yet,

That was all she did.

 

Later,

When evil was finally brought down,

He found his way back home,

To what was lost, 

But could never again be found.

 

His mother was gone,

Still held in their grasp.

His father had married another,

Hoping to clasp

At a new life.

 

He lived with his uncle

And did well in school

But still struggled.

He wanted to speak English,

Not Kurdish.

He did not want to communicate

With his new family.

Almost impossibly,

He missed what he called his ‘American family,’

The woman who he called mother,

And her sons and daughter.

He wanted to see them

And did not understand why he could not.

To him,

Evil and her were separate.

Her son and him were best friends.

 

Much later,

A stranger came to his village

To see him

And to ask him questions.

That was when he told the man to come,

For he wanted to show him something.