Oh..! We have Created Monsters

By Dr Aiman Khattak

We like to create things,
We like to always make new experiments,
That is our hobby, that is our job,
Creating monsters though particularly excites us.

We create all sorts of monsters,
Lean or straight; short or tall,
Stout or slender; robust or fragile,
We have created a wide variety of them so far.

As our monsters come in all shapes and sizes,
We are the favoured manufacturer,
People order and borrow them from us,
Far and wide, from around the planet.

We take special care in the finishing, 
Our monsters have the most gruesome appearances,
For that’s how we like them the best,
The more horrid they are, the better they serve our purpose.

Our monsters are often accidently set lose, 
They are uncontrollable due to their immense monstrosity, 
As they are set loose, 
They wreak havoc; they bring disasters and calamities.

Our monsters spread across every nook and cranny,
They enter homes; they invade lands,
They burn and bite; they capture and enslave,
They have the most ferocious ways of spreading fear and hate.

Our monsters are careful not to miss anything,
They trample on fields; they uproot trees,
They overturn water reservoirs; they damage the crop harvest,
They raze entire villages, towns, cities and countries.

As we see our monsters ruining people, families, lands,
We get perplexed at our own handiwork,
How to stop our monsters we don’t know,
For this we create more monsters.

We know our monsters are savage beasts yet we create them, 
We know they snatch and burn, bite and kill yet we sell them,
We know they devastate lives yet we loosen our hold on them,
We know everything yet we pretend we know nothing about them. 

It is only when our monsters cause the Anthropocene,
That our worry begins,
It is when they annihilate the more-than-human world,
That we begin to see sense,
But it is now regrettably too late.

Bio

Dr Aiman Khattak

Aiman has completed her PhD at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. She has worked on Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani literatures in relation to theories of empire and biopolitics to investigate the conflict in these regions.