ALICE IN HELL
Khan Bani Saad, Iraq
July 17, 2015
Death is as cold as ice,
and offers a discount, sometimes
like today, when the Iraqi sun
opening wide its orange mouth,
shows its teeth of ancient ivory,
the shrapnel of the artifacts
just exploded at Nimrud,
and says to all “Burn!”
The market is crowded with people,
who still have their head attached to their neck
thin, dark willow branches
with green and white beads necklaces
wrapped around
and a small winged rock hanging:
a miniature of an Assyrian spirit
with half-bull and half-lion body,
cherubs wings on its stone shoulders,
solid and aerodynamic
as those of an American fighter aircraft,
and the face of a young king who died
five thousand years ago.
The truck of the Death, full of ice blocks
blows the horn 3 times
attracting the people with their tongue out
and the sandy-colored flies
form circles in the air
as if they were living, vibrant halos
looking for new saints of the desert
with stigmata that bleed oil.
Two USA marines laugh, with hot beer bottles
in the side pockets of their camouflaged trousers,
they’re trading their lighters
for a talisman, a rosary with fake emerald grains
which protects against bullets and shells
sold by an old bearded Babylonian,
a resurrected priest, a son of Nineveh,
sitting on a rocking chair
near his rusted van.
A man darkened by the sun
is caressing his two goats
with human eyes and corroded fur
stained with blood roses,
while a woman is stretching blue fabrics
with her fingers painted purple,
a slice of her face framed
by black dunes sewn tight to each other.
The horn blows 3 times, again
threatening to leave.
“Jalid!” “Jalid!”
Rabia, twelve years old,
twelve dreams hidden under her yellow corsage
runs towards the truck of the Death
dragging her little brother;
she never saw a block of ice in one piece,
she never saw the ocean, the sea
a tap with hot and cold water.
An old man with a blindfolded eye
decorated with a red Pollock stain,
sees her and the other children run,
raises his shepherd’s stick, and shouts . . .
But it’s too late.
The bomb screams like an insane dervish,
who cries out the lines of an apocalypse
appeared in dreams, liquefied in his blood,
spitting its 3 tons of explosive.
The truck raises its back
like a large circus animal,
then shoots fire from the wooden flanks,
ice powder, iron splinters
before disintegrating
and staining the asleep summer sky,
up there, where big lungs
are accustomed to the tobacco of souls
to their sweet aroma, reminiscent of vanilla,
of a sudden decapitation.
Rabia finds herself on the ground
with burning hair, in a suit of dust
sorrounded by the acid smell
of today that dies too soon,
before sunset, before the lullaby of the crickets
before the luminescences of the curfew
before she can catch something good
during the fertile, fat silence of night.
She raises her back and looks around;
Where is everyone? she thinks
Five, Four, Three, Two, One...
The storm of sirens is delaying . . .
while her mother’s head rolls slowly
like a ball, toward her naked feet.
Rabia grabs it, stands up and begins to run
towards a hole in the smoke,
moving south, where the cardboard shingles
of the roof of her house appear,
close to the long leaves of a palm tree
which flowers hand bombs instead of dates.
She will keep her mother’s head safe,
she will never forget her face.
—Not this time —
A ghost with big hands, without head
is already too much in that house
I miss you, Daddy!