Poem Of The Week: Bystander By Abeer Ameer

It might be Syria, or Iraq – the country of the poet’s birth. And it might be Gaza. The placing of location in Abeer Ameer’s fine and frighteningly controlled poem, is secondary to its wider impact. For the meaning of ‘Bystander’, like the immediate consequences of a randomly-lobbed missile, radiates outwards to disfigure landscape and livelihood, culture and inheritance.

The stuff we don’t see on our television screens, the stuff we hide behind cold-blooded and anodyne military jargon – collateral damage - enables a willing suspension of disbelief alongside a denial of complicity, as though to justify the resulting carnage. And if we seek an illusory finality in the percussive silence that follows an explosion, we shouldn’t forget that misdirected rockets reinforce hatred, create division, and sow the seeds of future radicalisation. On and on, ad infinitum...

Nor do they melt away, and instead, leave the bewildered bystander on permanent ‘stand-by’. The narrator of Ameer’s measured and profoundly ironic poem juxtaposes the details of a comforting, almost seductive, normality with an image of its obverse, whose sign is retribution, a perverse incarnation of Revelation and an empty promise of redemption for its propagators. ‘Guidance’, in Ameer’s clever recalibration of intention, is absent, along with any sense of humility.

Her final verse is apocalyptic, rendered in the infernal language of those, like John of Patmos in the ‘Eons’, who would be happy to restore hell on earth.

‘Bystander’ is taken from Inhale / Exile, published by Seren (2021) and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

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