First Post: The Pain of War

For my first post, I thought I would offer a poem, though this will not be a typical post. I wrote this in February 2003, anticipating the horror of what everyone then thought would be a long seige and battle of Baghdad. Of course it has now turned out to be just such a horror, even if it occured in slow-motion. With the specter of an additional 20,000 or more United States troops, and who knows how much urban fire-bombing, surging in to support Shi'ite militias in their ethnic cleansing of that ancient city, the poem suddenly has a new immediacy. I altered the title ("seige' to "surge") and the opening line a little to fit the "surge"

Fair notice: it is a very sad and graphic war poem, but we must grapple with the pain we are causing as a nation. If we cannot face it even in print, we can never generate the empathy needed to put an immediate stop to this and all war. And the end, consistent with all real theology, offers hope.

LETTER FROM A FAMILY UNDER SURGE

Only one of them died, Mr. Bush, the night our recovering enclave
Exploded again under the newest American killing scheme.
A jagged chunk of concrete crashed through our window
And cracked her little skull.
But she stayed conscious a long time
Shrieking and wailing from the splitting pain of mortal injury
But even more from the dizzying disbelief and soul-wounding
Knowledge that a grown-up did this to her on purpose
She looked at me with pleading, prayerful, black Arab eyes
Wanting desperately for me to make this all better
Like I had always done before
But somehow knowing I could not
I felt I was betraying my own baby as she bled out on my bosom

Do you know the pain, Mr Bush of watching your child die
And being powerless to stop it?
Do you know the unholy torment of the look in your others children’s eyes
As they realize their own mother cannot protect them?

My second little girl lived two more weeks
She had a cold, just a little cold
Before the lights went out, the water stopped
The sewage and garbage began to pile up, the bodies to rot
All the medicine ran out
The doctors could not move, nor could we.
You did not count on our resolve to fight you in the streets
You thought we would accept your purge
Your conquer and plunder of our ancestral lands
You are both foolish and arrogant to believe that only you know the truth
That only smart bombs and titanium armor breed courage
She got a cough, then a fever, then the fluid began to take her
She gasped for days, determined to outlive this horror
But the bubbling hot, fire-stoked, thick mud in her lungs was too much
Two dollars worth of penicillin would have saved her

Just after her last breath, my oldest son, a sweet, smart 16-year old,
Burst out the door in a terrifying bloodlusted rage
So lost in hatred and vengeance he flung himself wildly at your guns
Futilely and insanely
AND WITH MORE COURAGE AND
PURE BEAUTY THAN I HAD EVER SEEN
He pathetically hurled rocks and broken glass against your bullets
For a flashing instant I was so proud of him
But then I realized he too was about to die in front of me
Shredded by a close-quarters, urbanized-warfare, anti-personnel unit,
By which you mean a slaughtering machine

My oldest daughter, barely Fourteen, I swear, Mr. Bush, she just died of grief
She simply could not live in a world where
Human beings actually do this to each other
She wanted to be a mother one day
To labor to create and nurture life herself
She had no place in a world of men who could destroy it so causally

I watched my second oldest boy, a proud, but half-starved Twelve-year old
Say a Prayer for my soul just before I closed my eyes for the last time
Can you imagine the pain, Mr. Bush, of watching your young child
Watch you die?
With my last conscious act I prayed that he would live through this
That one day he would come to your country
Show up on your door step
And drop to his knees to wash your feet in his tears
So that for at least one moment in your life
You will be able to feel
What all the Christs of all the ages have meant
By the word Love.

OK, back to commentary:

You see, true divinity appears mad in world of pride and vengeance. Washing the feet of the man who ordered the killing of your entire family? Who would do such a thing? The answer most relevant to Twenty-First Century America: Jesus.

The mother's final prayer for true love looks like weakness in our world; looks like pure fiction from a Muslim, whom we are taught understand only force and violence. This is precisely the problem. Until we can imagine a world in which hatred is met with love, until we are able to meet hatred with love, we will never live in peace and love ourselves. That's what I mean when I say that divinity and true love are highly radical, even dangerous today.

I cannot claim to have the courage to live true to these teachings always, or even most of the time. I can only do my best. All of us can only do our best, but we must at least make the attempt. For who else is there?

OK, enough sermoning for today.

I will be back very soon with posts on war and peace, the economy, politics and equality, with some poetry occassionally interspersed.