Brian Turner (b. 1967) grew up and was educated in California and Oregon. He served in the Army, being deployed in 1999 and 2000 to Bosnia and Herzegovina and in 2003 to Iraq. Here, Bullet (2005), from which “Sadiq” comes, is based on his Iraq experiences, and won him the Beatrice Hawley Award.
“Sadiq” is a soldier’s poem, knowing about the energies that animate and have animated soldiers in war, not asking the soldier to renounce those energies, to refuse to let them animate his or her destructive work, whether by the guns Turner used or the bows and arrows evoked in the Persian poet Sa’di’s epigraph. What Turner asks is something else than not to kill, something less that is also something more: “it should break your heart to kill.” A high standard to meet, and meeting it would get in the way of most wars.
It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.
—SA’DI
It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in a desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.