Road to Ruin

Mount Belles

Trafficking - a bird's-eye view

*

Your restless, telescopic eye
scans northern mountains’ knuckled spines,
where women move across the scree
like puppets on slack wires.

Searching for stray ewes, a shepherd
finds a young girl at his feet,
folded between sheets of snow
as if in seamless sleep.

They come like lambs to abbatoirs,
fleeing the haunted, hungry east,
drawn across gaunt passes
by false harbingers of warmth and peace.

They come dressed in their village best,
the wings that speed them to the west
their misplaced dreams of liberty and plenty,
not this random death.



*



The Ascent

You watch them as they move towards the trees:
mostly they are women, invariably young,
who seem to glow against the sombre greens --
perhaps it’s hope, the spirit of such journeys,
that makes them flare and flicker in the twilit forest
aisles, like candles against dim cathedral choirs,
until they are extinguished from your view.

To manage the next sighting you must soar
above the scree, imagining eyelashes turned
to stalactites, and tears to ice.
Now they move like soldiers in defeat, stumble
in a wilderness of white toward an unseen peak
as cloud hangs low with threat of unshed snow
and night advances with relentless strides.



*



Unseasonal snow


At first she seems enchanted
as a child, catching the flakes in flight,

the swansdown wisps
caress her face and hair;

then with a mute, insistent threat
the chill sets in, a hint of lead

that slows her tread and blood
until brute gravity descends on her.

The snow looks soft as fleecy
nursery coverlets, arranged with care -

she sinks upon it, drowsy, half aware
that hazy angels hover

amid shards of air,
above the blind earth waiting to receive her.



**********************************************
Note: The Mount Belles massif forms part
of the border between Bulgaria and Greece.
Groups of (mainly) women from eastern
Europe cross the mountain border on foot,
some voluntarily, while others are sent
on forced marches over the same route by
their ostensible “employers”, all thereby
becoming illegal immigrants to Greece,
where they mostly disappear without trace,
enslaved in the brothel and nightclub trade.
Mount Belles has repeatedly claimed
the lives of such women.