A dead infant. A night-crushed car. A farmer slumped over a Toyota steering wheel near an Army checkpoint. A distraught relative staring beyond, pieces of brain on the dashboard. The refusal to render aid. The fresh dark soil over the bodies.

The boredom. The minutes. The hours. Days. Weeks. Months. The moments unbound by time’s dominion. The years after.

Torture fragments. A man pissing on the Qu’ran. A man at a rifle range firing a bullet. A bullet carrying the middle vowel of the word Inshallah. A combat load of ammunition.

3rd Squad. 1st Platoon. Blackhorse Company. The faces – ones I hated and the ones I loved. Even the ones I don’t remember. And all who don’t remember me. Contact. Three O’Clock. 50 meters. Talk the Guns.

And Seattle at night. Rain drizzling down. First weekend home from war. Sgt. Gould sucking a woman’s nipple in the cuddle room at the rave party. Glow sticks in mouths, a language of light. A language I don’t recognise. A man in an Energizer bunny suit, on roller-skates, bass pounding the camouflage of tireless eternal Easter followed by a brunette in black leather bustier, thigh-high wet leather PVC boots, her eyes the dark carbon from the barrel’s chamber as she pulls a leashed man by the throat. These people. My people.

Put it all in the rucksack. Throw the rucksack on your back and call it your house. Do a commo check with anyone out there in the bush, listening. Do a commo check back home. Get your shit on straight. Stay Alert and Stay Alive. Drink water and conduct your PCIs. We’ve reached the Line of Departure. So lock and load, man. From here on out we are on radio silence.

I was called out into a field of compassion
into a universe of billions of souls

JOHN BALABAN

The Mutanabbi Street Bombing

March 5, 2007

In the moment after the explosion, an old man

staggers in the cloud of dust and debris, hands

pressed hard against bleeding ears

as if to block out the noise of the world

at 11.40 A.M., the broken sounds of the wounded

rising around him, roughened by pain.

Buildings catch fire. Cafés.

Stationery shops. The Renaissance Bookstore.

A huge column of smoke, a black anvil head

pluming upward, fueled by the Kitah al-Aghani,

al-Isfahani’s Book of Songs, the elegies of Khansa,

the exile poetry of Youssef and al-Azzawi,

religious tracts, manifestos, translations

of Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Neruda –

these book-leaves curl in the fire’s

blue-tipped heat, and the long centuries

handed down from one person to another, verse

by verse, rise over Baghdad.

As the weeks pass by, sunsets

deepen in color over the Pacific. Couples

lie in the spring fields of California,

drinking wine, making love in the lavender

dusk. There is a sweet, apple-roasted

smell of tobacco where they sleep.

They dream. Then wake to the dawn’s