| Murdered
Children
Two
Children took a trip one day,
to State Supreme Court in the Bronx,
to tell how Mother and Father
murdered their four year old sister.
They shyly spoke in muffled words
of relentless years of abuse
suffered in their cruel apartment.
These days it happens everywhere.
They talked of terrible torture,
being tied to chairs and beaten,
burned with cigarettes, or matches,
while their sister S. got the worst.
So they beat their daughter to death.
Later the little children swore
that S. was always hardest hit,
she was hated and called ugly.
S. was tied to a chair at night,
her little bones curled to the plastic,
and not allowed to use the bathroom,
then punished for wetting herself.
A. witnessed her sister’s murder,
a bloody room-to-room journey
that began inside the bathroom,
because S. drank from the toilet.
Both parents were quick to beat S.
in the bathroom, the living room,
and finished her off in the kitchen,
leaving her dead on the table.
J. was the first to testify,
a graphic seven year old’s tale.
Her mother warned her to shut up
or she’d get the same thing as S.
J. described her own injuries,
beaten, then burned with cigarettes,
burned with a hair curling iron,
then tied to a chair for the night.
R. was the next to testify
and told the judge he would not lie.
He tightly clutched his "Star
Trek" figure,
lost in his over-sized jacket.
R. told the same tale of horror
that was told by his two sisters:
Mommy and Daddy beating S.
because she always made them mad.
Then the testimony ended
and the children still were doubted,
vulnerable young witnesses,
trapped in a world of despair.
Then the children left the courtroom
with their lawyer, eating candy,
little bodies undernourished,
while Mother blew kisses good-bye.
Then Mother took the witness stand,
a troubling inhuman face,
nervous from the lack of cocaine,
who wouldn’t be mother of the year.
She’s trapped in an endless cycle
of violence and child abuse
that could not have been prevented
by our crumbling culture.
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