Sunday, June 04, 2006

The War Chronicles


The writing is on the walls of Haditha,
splashed on ceilings and floors,
etched in potshots,
bright red and freshly painted
with the blood of
Mohammed's children.

The writing is in their eyes,
shell-shocked,
grainy,
aching to close.

The writing is scrawled in the skys,
jetted between the clouds,
riding erratically on sun rays,
trolling death in dusty puffs below.

The writing is on their palms,
chronically sweating, and their fingers,
filthy with the knowledge
of hair-trigger death.

The writing is in our toothless smiles,
dimpled in American Idols,
close-mouthed, too ashamed
not to zip up the lies.

The writing is on their boots,
broken and scuffed to second-hand vintage
well before their time,
regularly in search of new feet.

The writing is on every cigarette,
burning a hole in some soldier's lung,
while he lip-pops smoke rings, wafting
through the air like sweet lost souls .

The writing is on our heads
and the pen is in our hands.
How many more must die
before the ink finally, finally runs dry?

© The Unknown Candidate

Photo credit: This image taken from a videotape made by a Haditha, Iraq journalism student and obtained by Time Magazine via the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, shows a scene in what appears to be a morgue following an alleged fatal raid by United States forces which took place on Saturday, Nov. 19, 2005, in Haditha, Iraq. The alleged murder of about 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, a volatile town in western Iraq, has barely caused a stir in Iraq and much of the Arab world _ where American troops are reviled as brutal invaders who regularly commit such acts. (AP Photo/Hammurabi Human Rights Group, File)

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

beautiful poem, dude. thank you.

The Unknown Candidate said...

Thank you, my friend. ;)