For Cindy Sheehan and the residents of Camp Casey
image: Iraqi men grieve outside a hospital following an attack by insurgents in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk August 4, 2005. More than two years of war, occupation and insurgency have turned Iraq into possibly the most psychologically damaged nation in the world, one of the country’s top psychiatrists said on August 4. Dr Harith Hassan, the former head of Baghdad’s Pyschological Research Centre, estimated that more than 70 percent of the private clients he sees each week are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a severe anxiety condition. REUTERS/Ali Jasim/Files
(Photo by Stringer/Iraq/Reuters)
Cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, and My Left Wing.
image and poem below the fold
Song Against Natural Selection
by Edward Hirsch
The weak survive!
A man with a damaged arm,
a house missing a single brick, one step
torn away from the other steps
the way I was once torn away
from you; this hurts us, it
isn’t what we’d imagined, what
we’d hoped for when we were young
and still hoping for, still imagining things,
but we manage, we survive. Sure,
losing is hard work, one limb severed
at a time makes it that much harder
to get around the city, another word
dropped from our vocabularies
and the remaining words are that much heavier
on our tongues, that much further
from ourselves, and yet people
go on talking, speech survives.
It isn’t easy giving up limbs,
trying to manage with that much
less to eat each week, that much more
money we know we’ll never make,
things we not only can’t buy, but
can’t afford to look at in the stores;
this hurts us, and yet we manage, we survive
so that losing itself becomes a kind
of song, our song, our only witness
to the way we die, one day at a time;
a leg severed, a word buried: this
is how we recognize ourselves, and why.
– – –
This diary series is dedicated to all who suffer because of war
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 Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
read this soldier’s blog
witness every day
