image: Afghan widows wait to receive food rations at a CARE International food distribution center in Kabul, Afghanistan, where Clementina Cantoni worked, Wednesday, May 25, 2005. (AP Photo/Tomas Munita)
support the Iraqi people
support the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC)
support CARE
support the victims of torture
support the fallen
support the troops
support the troops and the Iraqi people
read `This is what John Kerry did today,’ the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s blog – `Bagdhad Burning’
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
witness every day
today’s witness is dedicated to women
image and poem below the fold
Apology
by Richard Berlin
High above a northern coast
I read my poems to William
and Father Paul.
A cormorant speeds down a shore
lined with granite boulders
black as dead men’s teeth.
I’ve been over my head in this winter
sea,
bones aching cold from all the dead
and dying
I’ve held this drowning year:
William alone in a hospital room
plastic tubes streaming like seaweed;
Father Paul alone in the rectory,
electricity burning his legs,
his smile and wasted hand
trembling an offer of gold-wrapped
chocolate.
My own distant father drifts here, too,
always dying in Piscataway, N.J.
William paints now on a warmer coast
and believes he is cured.
Father Paul died in his sleep.
And I cry survivor’s guilt,
apologize for stealing their pain
for poems, ashamed of my living greed,
like a sailor flailing
for a piece of wreckage as he swallows
the ocean and his own tears,
a moaner buoy somewhere in the
distance
the only voice he hears.
caption, continued: The May 16 kidnapping of Cantoni was the latest in a series of attacks targeting foreigners in Kabul, reinforcing fears that militants or criminals here are copying tactics used in Iraq.
Read last night’s dKos diary by khyber900 celebrating Cantoni’s release. Revisit my earlier witness, when it was feared that she had been killed.
