An Evil Cradling
A letter to Brian Keenan
   
Terrified,
I sat bolt upright;
terrified by your words,
the book dropping
from the numbness
of my hands
onto the coverlet.

Then fled from the
sudden presence
in the room;
washed my face and hands
as if to exorcise
an evil.  

Tried
to come to terms.
I slept no wink that night,
too terrified to lay me down,
the horrors of that
immobilised, inhuman,
suffocating, mobile
entombment
vivid,
its terrors
far, far beyond
the powerful imaginings
your images
set stalking in my mind.

Those awe-full
moments
which you laid on me,
which you described
with such a passion
that my blood was
curdled -
and yet which were
written with such
dispassion that they
were bloodless -
are with me still,
ten years after
your words,
your dreadful words,
fell, screaming,
from my hands.

And all man’s
movements,
so natural,
so instinctive,
were forcibly
denied you
for those
hours
spent in those
coffin-like environs

beyond cruelty.

Postscript:

 I first read An Evil Cradling shortly after its publication, and this dedication does not exclude Terry Waite and John McArthy, who underwent with Brian Keenan, time and time again, the truly unimaginable horrors that the part of the book to which this poem refers, in particular, describes.  Suffice it, here, to say that there is a description of being encased, naked, from head to toe (apart from the nostrils) in layer upon layer of brown sticky, parcel tape, and then being carried like a mummy to a waiting vehicle and being slid like so much timber into a hidden compartment beneath the floor and transported, in the daytime heat of Lebanon, for unknown hours.

 How these three noblemen endured such treatment, and were then able to return to a life of relative normality is totally beyond my understanding.

And the same phrase applies not only to those – many are described with love by Brian Keenan in this book – who shared with them the endless hours and horrors of incarceration, but to all of those uncounted, unknown prisoners who have suffered at the hands of other ‘men’, for whatever reasons, down the generations of the human race, in the dungeons, the oubliettes, the cages and in all the gulags where inhumanity exists in all its different guises.

 There are constant reminders of this inhumanity spread, like rancid butter, across our daily bread.

 It is only from the humane example of Brian Keenan and his fellows that I have been able to begin to comprehend how inextinguishable is the torch burning in the human soul.

For that reason, but not for that reason only, I commend to you Brian Keenan’s book.