the many months to follow, each day’s exquisite light,

the snowfall in Mosul, the photographs a family took

of children rolling snowballs, throwing them

before licking the pink cold from their fingertips;

Years unravel like filaments of straw, bleached gold

and given to the water, 1967 and 1972, 2001 and 2002:

What will we remember? What will we say of these?

it awakens the dead from the year 1258

who cannot believe what is happening here, Not a shot fired –

our internalised panic deeply set by years of warfare,

the siege and adrenaline always at the surface, prepared;

the dead from the year 1258 read from ancient scrolls

cast into the river from the House of Wisdom,

the eulogies of nations given water’s swift erasure;

and the dead watch as they are swept downstream –

witness to the soft, tender lips of the river fish

who kiss the calves and fingertips of these newly dead,

curious to see how lifeless bodies stare hard

into the dark envelopment, hands

waving to the far shore;

the djinn awaken from their slumber

to watch the dead pass by, one fixed

with an odd smile, the drawn-out vowel

of a word left unfinished, and they want to hold these dead

close and tight, the lung’s last reserve given

as a whisper of bubbles for the ear held up to it;

the djinn swim to reach the bony ankles of Sabeen,

the muscled Askari, clasping to stop them

from this tragic undertaking;

and some are nearly saved by others diving in

to rescue the terrified and the stunned,

but drown beneath a woman’s soaked abaya;

and the Tigris is filling with the dead, filling

with bricks from Abu Ghraib, burning vehicles

pushed from Highway 1 with rebar, stone, metal,

with rubble from the Mosque bombed in Samarra,

guard towers and razor wire imprisoning Tikrit,

it fills with the pipelines of money;

marketplace bombs, roadside bombs, vehicle-driven

bombs, and the bombs people make of themselves;

Gilgamesh can do nothing, knows that each life is the world

dying anew, each body the deep pull of currents below, lost,

and lost within each – the subtle, the sublime, the horrific,

the mundane, the tragic, the humorous and the erotic – lost,

unstudied in text books, courses on mathematics,

the equations quantifying fear,

or the stoppage of time this eternal moment creates,

unwritten history, forgotten in American hallways, but still –

give them flowers from the hills, flowers from the Shanidar cave,

where mourning has a long history, where someone in the last Ice Age

gathered a bouquet – give daisies and hyacinths

to this impossible moment, flowers to stand for the lips

unable to kiss them, each in their own bright beauty, flowers

that may light the darkness, as they march deeper into the earth.

Helping Her Breathe

Subtract each sound. Subtract it all.

Lower the contrailed decibels of fighter jets

below the threshold of human hearing.

Lower the skylining helicopters down

to the subconscious and let them hover