Dearest Zainab,
whenever my country bombs your country,
I think of you.
Which means you are frequently on my mind.
I often think of the bombers
and how little they can see
of what is below them.
Many who returned
from earlier “missions”
said it was only later,
when they went back
and saw the ground
they bombed
that they realized
Iraqis planted
cereal grains
that covered miles
of “desert”
in brilliant green.
I think of how much you like green. And how, when you visit me
I make sure a window from your room looks out into nothing else.
It is our ignorance, Zainab,
that is killing us too
as well as your relatives
and friends.
Our teenage sons
and grandsons
especially:
shot down and left
like roadkill
in the street.
What can we say
of the madness that
The Greedy so savagely
exhibiting their starvation. So fearful
they will die of old
age
without having truly felt
—beyond bottomless hunger—
any fullness at all.
If only they could have let themselves
become acquainted
with their fear
enough to engage,
eye to eye, directly,
with the dreaded “Other.”
If only they could have learned
to sit with the people
they intended to rob
and to notice, with compassion, the easily
ignitable thinness
of their clothes.
And not now speak to them
in the language of the inflated
though fatally empty man
the language of bombs.