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JB Mulligan

Chele Kula

My father's father's father
might have been a child

when your cause exploded
in the heart of your enemy.

They built a monument of skulls -
they'd built on your bones

for centuries, but this time
was different, this time they knew

that they had lost,
had won just bloody fragments

of the land, red ragged mud
and shards of shattered stone.

They felt the knife at their loins,
and they built you an altar

enshrining the host of your skulls.
Now it is a tree

of hope in the crooked mountains,
still brimming with screams and explosion,

filled with the future of your past
and broken, empty seeds of your blossoming fruit.

("The First Serbian Insurrection (1804-12) was led by Black George.... His forces suffered a major setback at the battle of Chegar in 1809, when the Serbian commander, Sindzhelitch, hopelessly outnumbered, exploded an ammunition store, destroying his own men with the enemy. The victorious Turks built near Nish a tower, still standing, in which the skulls of the defeated insurgents were embedded. This tower is known as the Tower of Skulls (Chele Kula)." Vasko Popa, Collected Poems (trans. Anne Pennington) - from the notes to Earth Erect)

JB Mulligan writes: Married, three children. Poems and stories in dozens of magazines over the last two decades plus, including recently The Rose & Thorn and Ducttape.