For Khaled al-Asaad
We called him Uncle,
kind-quiet oldie man
with his liney-face smile
and his sun-glint specs,
sometimes giving us
a shiny piastre,
a sticky basbousa,
a sharp look if we swore.
All us townies knew the time of day
by his morning walks to the Museum,
his evening walks home:
long retired but always working.
But when They came
all clocks changed,
Uncle’s too.
We children were in bed
but we heard hushes
that he was walking,
always Museum-bound,
at night in cool dark.
First Tadmur was blown to pieces by Them,
then all Shia shrines and Sufi sanctuaries:
all us townies were called out to watch,
to try not to plug our ears to Their blasts.
When They got Uncle
we asked our parents
what They would do:
nothing as long as he told Them
where he had hidden
the ancient treasures,
where he had preserved
art, history and knowledge.
Then They called us all out to watch again:
Uncle, filling our blinding-sun town square
with his slightness, his silence, his past.
One of Them recited, another hacked off his head.
Oldie-blood’s
feeble pumping
is soon done:
They hung him
from a traffic-light –
we clustered
to gawp nakedness
beneath his spattery thawb.
A man’s balls are just as old as him,
so Uncle’s were eighty-three years of age
when they were screamed with electricity,
made both defiant and charcoal by flames.
Uncle’s head,
once so twinkley
in generosity,
They placed
at his unshod feet:
those round glasses
still there,
still catching the light.
Ted Eames, 2018