Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak is a short but provocative book of poems from several of the detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. Much has been written about the legal issues and violations of human rights, but here we can hear the silenced voices of those dehumanized in detention without access to justice. Here is one of the poems:

Death Poem
by Jumah Al Dossari

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience.
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul.
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”

Jumah al Dossari, a thirty-three-year-old Bahraini national, is the father of a young daughter. He has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more than five years. In addition to being detained without charge or trial, Dossari has been subjected to a range of physical and psychological abuses, some of which are detailed in Inside the Wire, an account of the Guantánamo prison by former military intelligence soldier Erik Saar. He has been held in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the U.S. military, has tried to kill himself twelve times while in the prison. On one occasion, he was found by his lawyer, hanging by his neck nd bleeding from a gash to his arm.