this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war
we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people – without exception, or precondition, or judgement.
image and poem below the fold
An Iraqi girl Marwa Faris, 15, cries, after she was injured and her father killed in a roadside bomb explosion, in Baghdad, Iraq, Thursday Sept. 7, 2006. Faris was on her way with her father to appear for an academic exam in their car, when a roadside bomb exploded killing her father, injuring her and another civilian. Elsewhere, in the capital five bomb attacks targeting police patrols in Baghdad which left at least 18 people dead and some 57 wounded on Thursday morning, police said.(AP Photo/Assad Mouhsin)
The Legend
by Garrett Hongo
In memory of Jay Kashiwamura
In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper,
flannellike against his gloveless hands.
There’s a Rembrandt glow on his face,
a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek
as a last flash of sunset
blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street.
He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese,
and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor
in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw,
dingy and too large.
He negotiates the slick of ice
on the sidewalk by his car,
opens the Fairlane’s back door,
leans to place the laundry in,
and turns, for an instant,
toward the flurry of footsteps
and cries of pedestrians
as a boy–that’s all he was–
backs from the corner package store
shooting a pistol, firing it,
once, at the dumbfounded man
who falls forward,
grabbing at his chest.
A few sounds escape from his mouth,
a babbling no one understands
as people surround him
bewildered at his speech.
The noises he makes are nothing to them.
The boy has gone, lost
in the light array of foot traffic
dappling the snow with fresh prints.
Tonight, I read about Descartes’
grand courage to doubt everything
except his own miraculous existence
and I feel so distinct
from the wounded man lying on the concrete
I am ashamed
Let the night sky cover him as he dies.
Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven
and take up his cold hands.
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