Blackbird Archive
← v10n1, Spring 2011
Poetry · Volume 10, Number 1

Disarmed

Lucinda Roy

He is still those boys at night when his dreams

are laced with genocide. When day breaks

and the armless beggars wander down Big Waterloo Street

he vaguely recalls something distant and obscene.

Weary of petty crime he’s ripe for another thrill ride

on the blade of a machete. He says nothing out loud

to anyone: the Colonel taught him the value of patience.

He knows one day the call will come again and, when it does,

he’ll be the first to sign up. He’s not afraid

of death—his or other people’s. He knows what they see:

a homeless Temne, a bobo, a dog.

Something bubbles inside his head. He lies

awake at night by the fetid open sewers

and listens to militias of rats on food raids.

Disarmed and dangerous, the child waits for democracy to spring a leak.

warviolencechildhood
Lucinda Roy

Lucinda Roy is a poet, memoirist and fiction writer. Her memoir No Right to Remain Silent: What We’ve Learned from the Tragedy at Virginia Tech was published by Harmony Books/Random House in 2009. She is the author of two novels, The Hotel Alleluia (HarperCollins, 2000) and Lady Moses (HarperCollins, 1998), as well as the poetry collections Wailing the Dead to Sleep (Bogle L’Ouverture, UK, 1988), and The Humming Birds (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1995). In 2000, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Richmond. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas. She is an Alumni Distinguished Professor in English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in creative writing and literature. Photo by Richard Mallory Allnutt, 2008