 My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.--Ursula K. Le Guin |
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War Poetry
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Last-Minute Message For a Time Capsule I have to tell you this, whoever you are: that on one summer morning here, the ocean pounded in on tumbledown breakers, a south wind, bustling along the shore, whipped the froth into little rainbows, and a reckless gull swept down the beach as if to fly were everything it needed. I thought of your hovering saucers, looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down, so it wouldn't be lost forever - that once upon a time we had meadows here, and astonishing things, swans and frogs and luna moths and blue skies that could stagger your heart. We could have had them still, and welcomed you to earth, but we also had the righteous ones who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War. When you go home to your shining galaxy, say that what you learned from this dead and barren place is to beware the righteous ones. --Philip Appleman from New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996 University of Arkansas Press |
For Sharbat Gula
Names have power, so let us speak of hers. Her name is Sharbat Gula, and she is Pashtun, that most warlike of Afghan tribes. It is said of the Pashtun that they are only at peace when they are at war, and her eyes�-then and now�-burn with ferocity. She is 28, perhaps 29, or even 30. No one, not even she, knows for sure. Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist. Time and hardship have erased her youth. Her skin looks like leather. The geometry of her jaw has softened. The eyes still glare; that has not softened. --Cathy Newman, National Geographic Your green eyes stopped our breath Made us realize how little we know of suffering How often it is borne by the nameless, the young Whose past is a bombed out city, an endless black field. Your thirteen-year-old heart was too ancient, too fierce to let us assuage our guilt too easily, You the daughter of a Pashtun warrior Who buried her parents at age six, Walked across snow-covered mountains Into Pakistan without blankets, with only a name That after seventeen years we finally know, a name That in Pashto means sweetwater flower girl. Through your daughters, and all the daughters of Afghanistan, we will keep trying to save you. --Judy Loest | |||