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The Scorpions
(A paramilitary unit Balkan War 1995)

Steven Pelcman

Eight legs and grasping pincers,
a narrow-segmented tail
carried forward and curved
over its back with a stinger ready
to strike its prey
as its eyes move quickly,

agility over any terrain
to find and destroy
with its venom injecting
and penetrating the skin.
The deadliest of them all,
the Death Stalker.

On a hot July day
the Srebrenica massacre
started with this hunger to
kill old men and young boys
in what had been declared,
a safe zone from the bombs.

What drives a scorpion
to strike-food, heat,
the sounds of life
unlike the hatred
that makes men lose
their humanity

only to toss half dead bodies
quivering like a pool of fish
feeding in a panic
of muscle and bone
into pits, mounds
of earth shaped by

sweating hands and dry blood
in a Balkan summer cleansed
by the bonfires of human ash
and unrecognizable faces
and limbs that were once
voices and tears and earthly touch.

The call to surrender
was a call of acceptance
to surrender, not arms or resistance
or pride but rather to surrender the
dignity for being alive, for existing,
daring to be different.

Is this why the scorpion attacks
at will, to deflect and distinguish
from rock or human flesh or
animals encroaching its space?
Is that what there is in common
with the scorpions that prowled

the small villages looking
for men and boys, Muslims
to drag out of a home and
line them up as they stand
on the edge of their final
destination before a small

hole in the back of their heads
make them fall losing all
gravity, time and space,
their dormant bodies
free-falling onto the friends
they had known all their lives.

Black flies like rain
feast on everything.
Through the smoke
they mistake gentle souls
for flowers that bloom
in summer.

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