Abstract
On Watching Little Birds, the Documentary on the Iraq War by Japanese Video Journalist, Takeharu Watai
We are here to make ourselves know
the other side of our forgetting. Baghdad
bustles under the glare of the midday sun;
we walk down the streets past brown men
plying their trade—falafel vendors, a locksmith,
the convenience store. Passers-by stare at us,
some wave, others, nonchalant, mop their brows.
We follow Ali as he walks to his car,
takes us just outside the city to his house—
a spare whitewashed square. Inside,
his wife is a shy black blur in the background;
the pictures on the walls show the brothers
he lost to Sadaam and the wars in Iran and Kuwait.
Out back, in the sandy yard, walled and snug,
his four children dance as children should dance.
They make faces and strut for the camera.
They think they're going to be movie stars.
We are not the audience they imagined, this knot
of bodies stilled in the weird anticipation of horror.
Already I am dissolving: But what use are our tears?
The camera zooms in on a little girl.
I would say her eyes were live question marks,
and her smile disarmed me with its crooked teeth.
She would have been beautiful, says her mother,
she would have grown up to be beautiful. . .
We are here because we know how this story ends.
She is at home, playing, and suddenly the light.
She cannot see her sister’s three-year-old body,
its outline on the wall, or the awkward angle of her
brother’s neck against the floor. She cannot see herself,
as we do: the giant wound from which her brain spills
red into the hands of her weeping father; her still body
in the room of bodies—some quiet, others writhing
on the edge of a slow dying. Perhaps she can,
and it makes her close her eyes, and shudder as we do.
Ali’s grief is a long chord in the orchestra around him.
Habibti, habibti. My love, my love:
The sound a man makes as he carries in one arm, a daughter,
in the other, a son who no longer breathe. We do
the incalculable math: Four children played jump rope,
threw a ball from hand to tiny hand. Three. Two. One.
One left—the girl with the bangs and twitching braid.
I find myself whispering too-late prayers to the dark
Please, God, let her live, please God let her live—
Gufran lives. Later, she walks inside, points for the camera:
Zainab was here; that’s her blood on the wall.
Gufran was at home, with Shahad, and Laith, and Zainab,
playing, as children should play, (God don’t take her
away). Now she haunts the courtyard, plays alone
half-heartedly, runs her hands along the terrible walls.
She lives and eats and says Yes, I miss them. I miss them.
And still her child’s fears: I lost my backpack, papa.
Her survival is an anxious relief—we know her life is
a flash, thunder in the hands of a careless god.
He will say this is necessary. He will name her dead siblings
Shahad, collateral Laith damage Zainab. He will say
her tears Yes, I miss them are the price of her freedom.
We in the shut coffin of the theater are a democracy
of emotions too complex to label. We flutter
out the doors, dampened shadows, walk home safe,
the dark fall night birthing its ghostly stars.
The Face of It: A Meditation on an HIV/AIDS Poster on the A-train
We could be sisters, though I recoil at the thought of blood ties
between us. Trapped behind the scratched display, you are shame,
a pinup girl for disease, the secrets of your body made public.
You are warning: the grimy underbelly of this city, the strange
wages of desire rampant in your blood. You are the transplant
gone wrong—a Trojan horse organ, the virus its stealthy passenger.
You are the junkie who lost everything but her bones to the slick
magic of needles; you are the witless wife who waits at home
for her husband to bring her again and again his lover’s bitter gift—
You are not me, blessed with trusty luck and cunning, the straight
edge of wariness my armor and rule. I wrap myself in this comfort.
I am the face of nothing but myself, which some days is all I can bear.
But above you, a single sentence: I didn’t think it could happen to me.
In its terrible mirror you, too, wear my fragile armor: in it your face
is mine—black, woman, well-versed in the world’s many betrayals,
its arbitrary lessons in pain. How we live in the crosshairs, you and I,
of our histories, our lovers, our own difficult choices. How we bear
our breachable bodies into each day’s survival. Our sisterhood, this.
Why It Happened
because she was the type
too-long legs and too-short skirt
wearing too much attitude too
much makeup those sluttish heels
that stride that sass that smile
because she shouldn’t drink
or drink so much, shouldn’t leave
her drink unattended when she drank
because she stumbled home alone
unattended and the streets were dark
because she didn’t lock the door
before she passed out in bed
because she liked to see the moon
in her window as she drifted off
the way it taught her how to be
a shadow and still to claim light
because she should have slept
with one eye open one alert ear
should have held her mouth
less tempting in its sleepy pout
because she should have known
it would happen as it always happens
should have heard the dangerous
breathing the telltale twig snap
the lusty heartbeat like a snare
the footfall light and invisible
as wind why didn’t she hear it
why didn’t she wake up the stars
warned in their silent shining wake
up the witnessing moon threw down
louder light and still she did not stir
the window opened and let him in
to lick the long limbs of her
and still she slept her ridiculous sleep
what was she dreaming anyway