The Wrong Crowd
Before you were used as a Taliban sentry in these hills,
before you were a bone, blown apart
and lodged in the rock of this cave,
before the geckos found you and made nests of your skull,
you were not necessarily against the West.
Maybe you just fell into step with the wrong crowd, got recruited
from a refugee camp on the border, somehow hoping to be reborn
or maybe just make a buck. After all, the Madrassas
can only take so many
and your mother had other children to feed. You used to be
one of those
typical kids from the camp, wearing a donated sweater
with a leaf pattern
and too-short sleeves. Constantly wiping your nose on them. Kind
until you learned not to be.
Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I want you to be something more
than what people say you are – an opium-smoking
religious faggot. A product of the buggery
you must have asked for
in order to keep watch from this rock face. Not much liked,
but still used all the time, you took the grunting of old men
behind a pigeon-laced wall at noon.
At night your Taliban brothers would have made supper,
laughing at the fact that they wouldn’t be the first ones found
if the Americans stormed this place. It would be you –
up on the rock cliff, struggling to take a shit –
your eyes wet with yawning, your lungs remembering
what it was to run through camp with a plastic bag kite
in boots too big for your feet, the taste of smoke
from your mother’s cooking fires and all the things
you had to eat – before the bad choices –
naan bread with rice and chicken,
sometimes saffron.
Once you had a soccer ball.
And a name –
Abdul-Hanaan, slave
of the merciful.