image: A boy stands next to his older brother laying in a hospital bed at the Yarmuk hospital in Baghdad, following last night’s car bomb in Mahmudiyah. Eleven people were killed, many of them children, when a car bomb struck a Shiite prayer room in Mahmudiyah, a lawless ethnically-mixed town in an area just south of Baghdad dubbed the Triangle of Death.(AFP/Karim Sahib)
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support the troops and the Iraqi people
read `This is what John Kerry did today,’ the 12/02/2004 diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
witness every day
image and a poem by a dKos member below the fold
From the Living to the Dead
by deepintheheartoftx
I see you in my sons’ eyes
reflected there, your mothers’ grief
transposed on my own image
Last night we went roller skating
I hadn’t been on skates in 25 years
“Just do your best, mom,” my six-year-old said.
When I fell, he helped me up
Am I doing my best?
Little by little parts of me grow cold
Sons, daughters, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and strangers
are dying
I cannot help you up
I do not know you, or even of you
As I make breakfast
drive to little league
and tuck my boys into their bunks at night
Your names are not posted on a list
Pinned to bulletin boards in the hall
Like the ones my mother looked at anxiously
on her way to class every day when she was in high school
Your passing is not noted in the
Halls of power
Your aborted lives unknown to us
As we work, and spend and
tend to living
Dark stains spread over my soul
like the soldier who covered herself
in black tattoos
Cover my good intentions with sticky tar
Yet
I see you in my sons’ eyes
