Day: January 30, 2023

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Now when the black sleeved muffled down drum is silent

And all the shrouded union flags fly high from their jacks

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When the scarlet and gold soldiers no longer mark

Time to drill ground orders and another mass bands beat

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When the right eyed queen lies in her crypt underground

The splinter still works its way out of the thin lined wound

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And still the wound and its fragments persist to seep

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©robcullen28012023

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On 25th January 2016 Giulio Regini disappeared?

And nine days later as if by magic reappeared.

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Words like disappeared seem so stupid somehow.

as if the torturers and killers didn’t know then and now

who I was, where I was, and what they’d done to me

over those long hours of those nine days and nights.

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Now in the silence I am able to speak about me and them.

Three times you broke my bones, and tore the nails

from my feet and my hands. And please forgive me

I confess I fully lost count of the number of times

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You burnt me with cigarettes. Did you forget?

And you punctured my body with stab wounds.

And how could I overlook the sparks and electrodes

on my genitals, after all I was a man among you men.

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And then you severed my spine with that final blow

and so, my life was taken. Another stupid phrase.

But the torturers and executioners have many lives.

So many lives. Far too many for me to describe.

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Imagine them with their wives and their children

with all that blood and gore, my blood washed

and cleansed, as they handle their daughters, sons,

mothers too. The intimate way they touch their wives.

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Are they clean and free of all that stains them?

How do they forget what it felt like holding me down?

Of the sound of my breathing, of the smell of my sweat

as they strapped me and held me down. It’s forgotten?

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Let’s agree not to call them monsters and demons

shall we? They are brothers, fathers, uncles, sons.

If we make them different, we act and conspire

to make them special, different to the rest of us

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Making them different provides an excuse for us

to say too that we would not do what they did or do

when in fact they are like us, all of us, me and you.

A sickness has been unleashed on this earth, this world.

Humans look at what you are, and all of what you do.

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On 25th January 2016 Giulio Regini disappeared

the executioner’s reality was – he was in plain view!

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I read this poem at the Peter Finch and Red Poets poetry event in Soar Chapel Merthyr Tydfil on Saturday 28th January 2023.

Giulio Regini was a PHD studnet of Cambridge University researching the development and organsiation of Unions in Egypt.

Giulio Regini is still waiting for the truth of his death and who tortured and murdered him to be revealed.