They say the child's been radicalised <br />impregnated before their very eyes <br />a neat incision implanted with precision <br />blind stitched the cleft between truth and lies <br /> <br />How else could someone so young know <br />that a fire for justice would grow <br />beyond the need for wisdom or restraint <br />beyond fear or doubt or calculation <br />beyond the calming voice of reason <br />beyond the thought of treason <br />beyond the care if common people bleed <br />to concede the claims to lead <br />of men who play at being small pack gods <br />inducting them to suffer for the cause <br />in the hellfire spat from heaven <br />offer them in that blackened plume <br />of oil smoke and buckled burning steel <br />where life is pared of fripperies <br />barren as the landscape <br /> <br />They say 'radicalised' - a careful smear <br />the very quest to comprehend is now despised <br />on either side <br />a crime made of that last thread of virtue <br />before hope calls it a day <br />compassion gives way to the fiction <br />that holy truth is deemed to be <br />that which cannot cope with contradiction <br />when hands no longer scrape at barren soil <br />to find their roots <br />and humble people resign <br />to being trodden underfoot <br />and cannot rise <br />without the means of being radicalised <br /> <br />De-radicalise? <br />exactly how, and what should be excised <br />what charm or incantation? <br />a garlic infused stake driven through the heart? <br />water boarded incarceration? <br />a shaft of sunlight risen in the east <br />to lead the child back to the feast <br />to consume or be consumed by the greater beast?<br /><br />Barney Rooney<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/they-say-the-child-s-been-radicalised/
