Not-Her

“Just a child” is the phrase for them the NGOers always used.
A phrase in which “just a child” meant categories
of inviolable trust, of innocence destroyed, of abused

understandings between NGOers, parents, child, world.
But when I stepped back, and I was, in my role,
as overly involved in assuming what she was—“murdered”—

as anyone, I saw it all from a space-time continuum
not hers—and that was when I had to back off and try to see
it clear: the not-her who was not her file in Refugee Protection

and who, in some otherworld parallel to this one,
kept on staring over my shoulder as I read about
the murders of her, her father and brothers by gunmen

who came into their house and asked them
all to step into the street where in a business-like way,
in the back of the head, they gunned them down.

While her not-her looked on, I looked at violated
trust, innocence investigated, disabused
understandings between tribe and tribe, Mohammed

and Jesus, nation and nation, each examining her forensics:
“round contact wound with blackened seared
skin margins, lead snowstorm appearance

on X-Ray due to peeling back of bullet jacket releasing
minute lead fragments, radiating
fractures of occipital bone . . .” Almost nothing

to go on except the fact that she was in the database
the Protection woman showed me: “This,” she said,
“is what makes my job difficult.” But now that she was

not-her, did not-her need no protecting,
not just-a-child, not tooth-for-tooth, snowstorm, Mohammed,
Jesus, not-even-a-picture-of-her-living?