Desaparecidos
Last year, in Fredericton Mall,
a mother lost her little girl.
They found her in the women’s washroom
where two old ladies were cutting off her hair
and dressing her in a young boy’s clothes.
Wanted in Winnipeg.
Vanished in Vancouver.
Cheap alliterations in tabloid headlines
disfigure each tragedy.
Sometimes we think we recognize their faces.
This young girl with an old woman’s body
standing at a Yorkville window.
That other girl on Yonge Street
selling her body for drugs.
That flash of underage flesh
mounted by strangers
and glimpsed in a pirate video.
Do you call for call girls when you travel?
That midnight knock on your hotel door
is someone’s missing daughter.
You saw her once before on an airport advert
or on the carton of milk you opened
for your family’s breakfast.
What traveling salesman would you trust
to take your only daughter’s body and treat it well
while she promised him the sexiest time
he would ever have?
But in Goya’s Spain
it’s the males who disappear
usually during the night.
Most times, their families never see them again.
Sometimes, as in this etching,
their bodies are found, nailed to a tree
or dumped in a side street with the garbage.
rogermoorepoet 
This is grim Roger, very grim indeed
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It’s hard to believe how many people go missing and are never seen again. Young girls and young men. The problem is prevalent among our First Nations People. I find it very distressing, to say the least. It’s so difficult to write about in a meaningful fashion. The statistics on their own do not do justice to the personal suffering of victims and survivors.
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Statistics never do…Stalin said if one person is killed it is a tragedy but one million people are a statistic.
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I’d forgotten that quote. Thank you: it is very appropriate.
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Well he was a ruthless man but astute in realpolitick and the uncomfortable truths that we try to avoid.
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Wow… that is sobering and heartbreaking. Amazing writing, sir.
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Thanks, Meg. There’s a lot going on with this next book, Iberian Interludes. Golden Oldies and brand new poems, all mixed up. Heart-breaking … that’s how it should be.
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What does Mr Cake always say? Happiness writes white. (He is brain washing me!)
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Sometimes human beings are so good it makes you weep. But sometimes they are so evil. Hard to make the leap to God.
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Hard to read, but important. You ask a really pertinent question: What if it was your daughter? (or son?)
Excellent.
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I tried to link the passage of time, the Napoleonic Wars and the Spanish Peninsula, with modern day disappearances. In more than one way, such things have always been with us. Alas, both sexes have suffered, the women more than the men in times of peace and war. Goya’s lithographs The Disasters of War are just overwhelming. This is a Golden Oldie resurrected. I had forgotten about it and discovered it in my notes.
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It is heartbreaking and one more reminder of why we need to continue to work on behalf of the poor in this world.
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Disturbing but great writing.
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Disturbing is a great word: thank you. I discovered this among my old poems. It is previously unpublished. I revised it this morning. Heart-breaking really. I remember when we used to have the faces of missing persons on our milk cartons. So hard to look at over breakfast.
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its so sad and heart wrenching!! wish things weren’t like this !
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You, me, and so many others. Hopefully things will change. The streets are not a great place in which to live and grow up, especially in the Canadian winter.
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yes, the street is definitely not a good place to grow up… winter is worst! praying those on the streets will find help…
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