Child Bride? By Toni L.A. Cross

 Grossly underage marriages are far more common today than you think. In situations where the husband is much older, there is often frequent domestic abuse.

Some Facts:

More than 100 million girls in the developing world will be married during the next 10 years.

Although the definition of child marriage includes boys, most children married under the age of 18 years are girls.

While the practice has decreased globally over the last 30 years, it remains common in rural areas and among the poorest of the poor.

In Southern Asia, 48%—nearly 10 million—of girls are married before the age of 18.

In Africa, 42% of girls were married before turning 18.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, 29% of girls are married by age 18.

Excerpt taken from http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/341/facts.html

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What are you doing

Taking that life?

What are you thinking

This child is your wife?

What do you want

To control someone else?

Why do you beat her

With your leather belts?

To crush a spirit

Is that your game?

To rule over silence

A person with no name?

Then don’t call it marriage

This dictatorship

Just call it slavery

With an overseer’s whip

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Think That Thought? by Toni L.A. Cross

A skittering concept

Born of emotion

Grows in rapid

Hectic motion

Breath caught

Fills void space

In a frantic race

A second

An unguarded neutron

A moment of brilliance

And darkness revealed

A thought

Just a thought

And a nation froths

They simmer

They boil

Deceptive calm

Then

Eruption

Carnage

Broken survivor

You

Who dared to think

That thought

A Pitcher Full of Time… By Toni L.A. Cross

  

My fellow poet Charles Martin sent me this photo of his as a photo/poetry challenge. (Make sure you click on his name, to check out some of his work!)

Having recently watched the movie Inception, I’ve been thinking extensively about time. Thus, the two things have melded into this.

 

 

People ask how time as we know it

Began

And why cruel death stole into our world

They ask if eternity

Is a line or a circle, meter or a wheel?

But it is neither and it is both

Eternity is liquid

Within an endless, bottomless void

There are no lapping shores of time

There is no rocky bottom

Its ripple-rings spread out

Forever

Eternity cannot

Should not

Be contained

Then

Long ago in eternity past

Whispers of doubt and deceit

Filled the once untainted mind of man

Pride was born

And stretched itself

Like a cat awakening

What if eternity was caught?

What if it was compressed

Into boundaries and space?

Ageless immortal hands

That had never known disease

Dug into the earth from whence they came

And scooped up humble clay

Moist and soft

He flung it on a wheel

Spinning, spinning wheel.

Man shaped his own creation

Dampening his labor

With the sweat of his own conceit

Building and throwing down

Immense and elaborate plans

Grandiose schemes made of mud

Finally

Simplicity struck his tired being

And in that blasphemous workshop

A rude pitcher resulted

The surface he hardened

With the heat of his burning anger

To think that God had lied

That eternity was now his to control

Derisively

He grasped the handle

Reaching into the void

He scooped up eternity

Into his vessel

And held it triumphantly aloft

But some things are not meant

To be made that small

And unbeknownst to him

The essence within had changed

He grasped not eternity

But lost it altogether

And was left with a base extracted matter

Time.

Mortality.

Death.

But generations lauded

This failed attempt of man

Raising a temple of sorts

On an arid desert plain

Guarding the pitcher

With great blocks of sandstone

Until time was lost within itself

To evaporate slowly

Forgotten

In this sepulcher of independence