On the Liberation of Iraq
Passover 2003 for Albert Nieman
Ali, the boy with no hands, collateral damage in a barrage from hell, wants to commit suicide if Americans can't replace the hands they burned into oblivion. In the birthplace of Abraham in the Garden of Eden where writing began where the first laws were inscribed into stone America has sacrificed libraries and museums of antiquities while protecting the oil ministry for its records of oil fields and the Ministry of the Interior where the secret police dwelled with their juicy information on every one. The barbarians have invaded and it is called liberation killing mercilessly but never counting the bodies. History recalls the Romans slaughtering 500,000 Carthaginians to dominate trade routes in the Mediterranean. But the Pentagon won't count the dead and wounded in the Iraq carnage. It might frighten the free people of America and upset Arabs and Europeans. It might make some patriots embarrassed, remorseful or shocked by the horror of war. The burnt bodies severed limbs, and decapitations, the children wounded and orphaned, the mothers bereft of their children and husbands even the soldiers shoveled in heaps into mass graves.
Then there might be a call beginning as a whisper and rising to a shout and then a prayer for the end of war for the healing of wounds for truces and treaties for nuclear disarmament for the beating of guns into food and shelter and medicine. Then we will awake from the nightmare of history and overthrow the yolk of oil and empire. But there I go again dreaming of a new paradigm, an alternative universe expecting miracles like Moses and Aaron in Egypt and Tom Paine in America and Gandhi in India, like the creation itself and the consciousness that imagines these visions. Next Year. In a new transfigured world.