These three sonnets come from the newly released poetry book Organ Harvest, by Damian Robin, which exposes the murder of prisoners of conscience, particularly peaceful Falun Gong practitioners, for their organs in communist China today. For more information about this atrocity visit Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting.

 

Hard To Believe

In the West, it’s hard to bond an organ –
match live human flesh – person to person –
meld – make fresh – a deeply human token,
gifting a working function to one broken.
There must be matched consent to transfer – quickly –
while loved ones love or grieve, calm or angry.
If the giver’s still alive, the giving
has to leave the opened donor living
or it’s probed as murder.
____________________________Yet in China,
can you believe, there is a high yield quota,
deep in poisoned stomachs of the Party,
of transferred body parts for making money,
and damping down disquiet. This state life-thieve –
death by surgery – makes good souls heave.

 

 

Burning Issue

A man in a mask, a surgical mask,
whose eyes, like the mask, are expressionless,
scoops up raw flesh to a surgical flask
from a cooling body cut senseless.

The room is cool, his nerves are cool,
his assistants are stitching the gashes,
closing deep gaps in a tight-enough spool
with needles as curved as the surgeon’s eyelashes.

Fluff scurries in corners and wafted eyes narrow.
The body is shut with brusque, sewing arts.
A circle of lights is burnishing shadow
as the double doors flap and the organ departs.

Dead eyes are shut down, the body’s made ready,
unwashed, untagged and incendiary.

 

There Are Millions More

So here I am, slouched outside a furnace,
unclothed, untagged, my family not informed
– my treatments, interventions, they can’t guess.
My muscle-freeze sets in while hell-flame-stormed
incinerators hide the bones of men
and women and children further up the queue
whose organs fed the glut of Party men
and women who push to spread the Party glue.

As I no longer hurt, don’t pray for me
for I’m a stamped out man the West’s research
won’t reach – but there are millions marked, go find,
at home, in jail, in bed, or walking free,
whose urine, tissue, blood, hang on a perch
and could, at any moment, be assigned.

 

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9 Responses

  2. Joe Tessitore

    These are incredibly powerful.
    I applaud you for having the strength to write them.

    Reply
  3. Trevor Siggers

    Powerful representation of how humankind treats its own on pretexts so inhumane andfull for harm even to the perpetrators.

    Reply
  4. James Sale

    I am shortly going to be reviewing this collection for the SCP so won’t say more here, but love that rhyming ending: ready/incendiary!

    Reply
  6. David Watt

    You have summoned great strength to describe a truth in need of telling. Congratulations for writing these high-impact poems.

    Reply
  8. Jenni Wyn Hyatt

    Your choice of vocabulary and imagery highlights these atrocities very forcefully.

    Reply
  9. Damian Robin

    Thanks to all who have posted here for your spirit of compassion.

    Reply

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