Poetry

 

 

Robert Minhinnick

The Mongoose

(Zichron Ya'akov, Israel)

Last night no moon
but one shoulder of Orion.
Now dawn has drawn me down
to the modem and its madnesses,
the water cooler's air kisses.
Above, a roof of strangers in thick sleep,
computers snapped shut like steel snares,
the hookah and its bulb on the dining board,
tobacco cut with lemon and mint.

Outside, the ocean
is the corner of a page, turned up,
an inky fold of the Arab sea.
And once again she is impatient for me,
crouching for coffee grounds and crusts.
There my slattern waits, sleek as a snake,
a thief from the thicket slid into the sun,
but queen enough for a world no god would make.

 

After the Stealth Bomber

(Umm Ghada at the Amiriya Bunker)

It is years later now
but time can also run backwards.
Still she squats in candlelight,
Umm Ghada in the caravan,
or in 125 degrees Fahrenheit,
a cockroach ticking on her divan.

At night
they come out of the bunker,
the children, the old people,
but all a fog of flesh.
One body with four hundred souls
is exposed in a photographic flash.
They pick the wedding rings and wisdom teeth
from crematorium ash.

Who was it dreamed a stealth bomber?
Stealth steals.
Think of a smart bomb.
Not so smart.
Where the missiles entered Amiriya
daylight was star-shaped in the sarcophagus,
the concrete blasted back,
all the bodies foaming like phosphorus
in a bunker in Iraq.

The old women
took off their shoes
to welcome the fire that jumped into their mouths.
How quickly the children
found themselves unborn.

Yes, stealth steals.
But still Umm Ghada
guards. Umm Ghada,
who goads God
with her grief
and the ghosts she carries,
Umm Ghada, my guide
in the charnel house corridors.

What is she but a woman
in desert black.
Yet no desert was ever so black
as the sackcloth that Umm Ghada owns.
Not the Syrian desert's
Bedouin black, its cairns
of cold stones.

 

Note: The Amiriya bunker in Baghdad was destroyed by the USAF on February 13, 1991. Over 400 civilians were killed. Umm Ghada, who lost many members of her family in the destruction, became a guide at Amiriya, living on the site. I met her there in September 1998. Her whereabouts today are unknown.

 

 

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