Finished!!!

[SteveMetz]

Revised version of a ditty that appeared in Military Review.

Baghdad April

Who would have thought even minutes ago
Blackhawk swept from the taupe
Medieval California Kuwait to the quivering sandust of Talil.
Sweat, Al-Hilah, Marine bird, older than damp crew, machine
Smell, vibration ammo cammo scraped paint web belts, still
Tighten gray roar
Chaos, nose down, brown. Just get us there.

Now green. For ten thousand lives this river ran brown with blood
Helping reeds limber bodies once passed as blind. Just get us there.

Down, then there
BIAP, uncrumbled hull
Spurts and unthinking tremors, the shakti of nonduality,
Bills unpaid as new planes kneel lame,
Crying tarmac, shattered dust.
Fade, then the comic book cantos: a prince of
Babylon, sword of Assyria, builder of Ur, heavens perturbed,
Trauma hung close in broken glass
Facade (yet more)
Meaning deep to those who looted that brief cosmic day
Missed by those who watched.

Stories, reprise, thunder run
Endless dust nights of expendable men
blind (they must have been)
To spin a rusty truck against a tank
With only, what? passion? hate?
fear?
Perhaps no thought at all
Except to hope the engine would start (or not)
and someone else would see.
No matter. They are now mist, counters in a game.

Destroy and build, Shiva in web gear
While somewhere a bridge is lost. But what?
Who is destroyer, who a builder? We know
Often great power owns only dust.

Still there is BIAP
Flight out
Home, strong shoulders
Hiphop, fading you.
And then
A tiny point of blood receding on the glass.

May 2003