Simple Knots For Children

... my proper place was among the tiny figures
populating the camp ...
W. G. Sebald:  Austerlitz

A boy, six or seven, maybe, it’s not easy to be sure
because the sorrow in his face makes him so old,
gives him the look of a child who’s unloved,
never listened to with pleasure, who knows solitude
inside out and has been taught the hard way
that, for him, being born was a mistake.
So why doesn’t the lad undo the knots and scarper?
The thought’s blurted out before he can stop it,
look again at what’s staring him in the face,
take stock of his stupidity and curb his tongue.

The boy’s sitting on the edge of a bed, right wrist
tied to a bar in the head of the  next bed along,
so close that the rope, two feet if that, compels him
to hold his arm across his body and stay still.
The knots look cruel, too tough for a child’s fingers,
he’s been tight-leashed by an expert in restraint,
a specialist who’s discovered that rope’s a quick fix
when the drug cupboard’s bare of more subtle
tools and the pressures of empty syringes, hatred
and fear become the necessary mothers of invention.

Ken Head

If you have any comments on this poem, Ken Head  would be pleased to hear them.