Writing on the Wall

The angels cried for her as she was too innocent and naive to understand that the parrots she just freed would be the cause of her death by torture. Zohra Shah was just an 8-year-old innocent girl when she succumbed to injuries in a local hospital in Rawalpindi. She was brought to the hospital by her killers. Soaked in her blood, the poor angel was unconscious and her entire body turned blue owing to merciless torture and later she died because she was young enough to tolerate the excruciating pain. She committed two crimes i.e. she freed the expensive parrots and she was a poor domestic worker. Her employer had beaten her like a beast. Imagine a minor girl being kicked again and again in her private parts for countless painful minutes for a crime which wasn’t a crime in her eyes. Being herself a captive, she couldn’t see the parrots in the cage sighing for freedom. Zohra Shah, an unpaid domestic worker, was killed in the affluent neighborhood of Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s fourth-largest c

Compose for Red a proper verse; Adhere to foot and strict iamb; Control the burst of angry words Or they might boil and break the dam. Or they might boil and overflow And drench me, drown me, drive me mad. So swear no oath, so shed no tear, And sing no song blue Baptist sad. Evoke no image, stir no flame, And spin no yarn across the air. Make empty anglo tea lace words— Make them dead white and dry bone bare. Compose a verse for Malcolm man, And make it rime and make it prim. The verse will die—as all men do— but not the memory of him! Death might come singing sweet like C, Or knocking like the old folk say, The moon and stars may pass away, But not the anger of that day.   About The Poet:   ETHERIDGE KNIGHT was an African American poet who made his name in 1968 with his debut volume, Poems from Prison. The book recalls in poetry his eight-year-long sentence after his arrest for robbery in 1960. By the time he left prison, Knight had