Poems by Brian Turner
The Counting of the Dead (An Unfinished Poem)For Marla Ruzicka, founder of Campaign for Innocent Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC)
Here in Baghdad's neighborhoods, she's well beyond
the Green Zone, far from her Lakeport home in California.
In last night's journal she wrote—I have tried
red wine a little too much for medicine, deprived myself
of sleep, and yet, here she is, dressed in a black abaya,
walking house to house, knocking on each door.
She is here to count the dead, to discover the names
of the missing, where the wounded have gone to sleep
under whispers and wailing. And it's difficult to imagine
how she walked from house to house, not with rifles
and flexcuffs and sandbags, as I once did, but with questions—
to inquire of the dead, to learn who lived here
before the war, who has been lost.
*
What will we eat, the old woman asks.
Where will the next bag of rice come from.
Her husband, a police officer, was found
behind a wall on the outskirts of town,
slumped over with fourteen others,
each of them with a bullet in their head.
Like sheep. As if they were lambs to the slaughter…
What can you give to replace the man I love.
*
Behind another door, Akbar tells Marla
We think it was, well, maybe an illegal checkpoint.
It happened on the road to Balad, during Ramadan
this last year. And they shot them, my son
and his wife, they shot them right inside the car,
in the middle of the road, in the middle of the day.
He was an engineer. My son was an engineer.
Why do they have reason to shoot an engineer.
*
It was from the bombs, from the beginning,
that's what took my Lefta. Now every day I see
helicopters over the city, the bombs they have,
and all I can think is how he loved the café,
he loved to smoke tobacco and talk politics
in the café, he did, and more than anything
he loved to say poems, Hafiz and Sa'di and Rumi,
he could talk about them hour after hour.
*
And at another door, they have seen
far too much of death in their home,
they break down at the very question,
they close the door without answer.
*
Still another shows photographs from before
the war, pictures of her two young daughters, Alaa
and Rasha, and Marla remembers another photo
as this mother tells the story of these children—
the pile of sandals beside the bridge, the headline,
bodies given to the river by the hundreds.
But this isn't what this mother speaks of.
When she describes her Alaa and Rasha,
she speaks of Alaa's laughter, the shyness
of Rasha, of how they will never experience
the giving of birth, the tenderness of the breast,
the graveyard's dark upturned soil
gone pregnant with the dead.
*
And on and on it goes. Most houses ask—
Can the dead be counted if they didn't live here?
She had a cousin in Ramadi, He had a friend
in Kirkuk. The list is being written as we speak.
The poem has yet to be finished—
War, Oil on Canvas, 2006
It's just before dawn in Baghdad.
The crew chief walks the flight line
at the helicopter base. A mechanic
wipes her greasy hands with a blue oilrag
while a pilot, from Arkansas, drinks coffee
that tastes horrible, and thinks—
I should write a letter home.
It's been too long.
Near the Al A-I'mma Bridge,
a woman lifts the bucket to pour water
down the length of her body. Her husband,
lying in bed, stares at the ceiling
the lovemaking, the smell of their sex
still thick in the room. After breakfast,
they will each fasten an explosive charge
around their chests, helping one another
in silence.
Across town, Ahmed, the painter,
wakes to the dawn. Blackhawks lift off
the tarmac to rise up over the rooftops.
The day's traffic begins to drone
in the streets. He slices open a cantaloupe
the color of morning, deciding to leave Sona
to her dreaming. Let her sleep, he thinks.
Let her smell the lime flowers
drifting on the breeze, while I mix the oils
and prepare the canvas. By tomorrow,
I may well be dead. And if it is to be,
What must I paint today?
What the Lovers Do
I am on a rooftop in
I'm sure Jackowski would rather smoke a Marlboro than pull security up here, waiting for anyone trying to escape through the back door of their home. And I don't blame him. To be honest, I just want to sleep. I want to close my eyes and sink into the deepest, most silent place in the brain. A place where there is no dreaming. A place where I don't carry a rifle and my name isn't Sgt. Turner. And the other soldiers on this roof—They take off their name-tapes and remember their first names, setting their weapons down to walk off into Arizona or Washington or Florida, instead of sitting here on this rooftop, listening to a helicopter as it flies in and begins its wide orbit above us.
On a nearby rooftop, a neighbor hears the sledgehammer banging away and thinks thieves have come to rob his friend's home. He aims a pistol into the darkness of the street below—I'm not making this up—and he pulls the trigger, unloading an entire magazine of its bullets, not realizing there are close to 40 soldiers huddled in the shadows there, up against the walls and crouched behind the cars, and he's shooting at them. Suddenly, the night is lit up with tracer rounds. The tracers create a geometry of light no mind can keep up with. And my boss—he thinks we're being shot at. I think he's screaming at Fiorillo to fire the SAW, but the reports of the rifles from 2nd Platoon are so loud, my god, I can't hear a fucking thing but the firing of those rifles.
And this is when I see them. In the middle of a firefight, here in the middle of war, I see them, down in the dirt lot there below—how did I not see them before now? How did we all miss them?
In the very middle of the lot, there is a four poster bed with two lovers half in the sheets, half out. Kissing. Making love. They're kissing and making love in the middle of a war.
I don't know what to say. I'm all out of fire commands. And so is my boss—he stops yelling with his raspy voice and when it dawns on him what he's seeing, his jaw slowly drops open. When the bullets of 2nd Platoon die down, the guy crouching with his pistol on the far rooftop begins to hear the man and the woman as they moan together. The guys in 2nd Platoon do, too. The lovers have a deep and wounded sound, and they're sharing it with each other. We can all hear it now.
The helicopter shines its spotlight down on them, but they ignore it and continue on. They kiss until the bullets are all expended. They kiss until bombers fly overhead and drop their payload, each 500 lbs bomb bursting open into a confetti of light, their throats echoing in a glissando of pleasure, soldiers and civilians alike gathering round in mute witness to this defiant coupling, these two who would stop the war, if only for one night, here in this bizarre amphitheater, as improbable as it must sound, but my god, if you could hear it—if you could hear it as far away as Puget Sound, if you could hear it in the streets of your own city, if you could hear this now as she slides down taking him fully within her—and pauses—slow and sweet and heated, the city lights would singe in their filaments and burn out, the dogs would stop barking, the entire world would stand transfixed and stunned by what these lovers do, each of us holding our breath in anticipation as the muscles begin to shudder and the larynx lifts its uncontrollable voicing up into the atmosphere, disarming the war, weapon by weapon.
