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 judgment.
image and poem below the fold
Iraqis put the body of a relative into a coffin as they remove his body from a hospital morgue in Baquba. Shiite militiamen have fought deadly street battles with Iraqi police in the southern city of Amara on Friday that left police stations in flames and 18 people dead, witnesses and medics said.
(AFP/Ali Yussef)
Styx
by Dana Levin
You put a bag around your head and walked into the river.
You
walked into the river with a bag around your head and you were
never dead,
in your land of scythe and snow–
game on the banks of your
mental styx–
for the double
audience
of smoke–
—
You pressed a coin into his palm and stepped across the water.
You
stepped across the water with a hand on his arm and he was
silent and kind as you
shoved off, toward the smoky coils
of the greek-seeming dead–
You’d been trying to sleep.
Found yourself here,
in the mythocryptic land–
The river
—
had widened to a lake. You were anchored
in the shallow boat
by his faceless weight–
And on the green shore you could see their vapored
residue, how they could
smell it, those two, your blood’s
curl and shade–
If you
—
slit your wrist you could make them speak.
If you
slit your wrist you might be able to sleep, he’s
got a hand on your arm,
he wants you to see–
Dead, dead:
he wants you to see.
Ferryman, Sandman, head
a featureless
cloud–
Grief. It is Grief. Handing you back your coin.
– – –
a personal note: I had some time last night (this morning) at work to poke around the inernets, and you know how that can go. It quickly gets to the point where I don’t remember what link brought me to where, but eventually I always end up in a place that seems like just the right place to be at that time.
And so I came to Riverbend’s October 18th blog entry, her first since August 5th. She explains her absence:
There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I’d be filled with a certain hopelessness that can’t be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.
The subject of her entry is the recent study, published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, titled “The Human Cost of the War in Iraq – A Mortality Study 2002-2006”
Or, more accurately, Riverbend’s subject is her own sorrow.
We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?
Billmon was the link that brought me to Riverbend, and James Wolcott was my link to Billmon. I think I got to Wolcott from DailyKos, but that’s not the point.
Billmon shares his own thoughts and feelings about Riverbend or, more accurately, about what we have unleashed upon her and her country:
I was complicit (in this invasion and occupation). Because I was afraid — afraid to sacrifice my comfortable middle class lifestyle, afraid to lose my job and my house, afraid of the IRS, afraid to go to jail.
But not nearly as afraid, of course, as the thousands of Iraqis who have been tortured or murdered, or who, like Riverbend, are forced to live in bloody chaos, day after day. Which is why, reading her post today, I couldn’t help but feel deeply, bitterly ashamed — not just of my country, but of myself.
Like I said, eventually I always end up in a place that seems like just the right place to be at that time. Today, I acknowledge my own complicity.
– – –