And then I'm going to end on a final poem.
I also had a brother.
I have a big family, I have four brothers and four sisters.
And so one of my brothers was in Afghanistan for two years.
And so this poem takes a little bit of things he's told me
and things I know he's dealing with.
There's a Polish poet named Wislawa Szymborska.
So this has an epigraph at the beginning from her.
"Forgive me distant wars for bringing flowers home.
Why I don't mention flowers when conversations with my brother
reach uncomfortable silences.
In the Kashmir mountains, my brother shot many men.
Blue skulls from brown skins, dyed white desert sand crimson.
What is there to say to a man who has traversed such a world?
Whose hands and eyes have betrayed him.
Were there flowers there, I asked.
This is what he told me.
In a village many men wrapped a woman in a sheet.
She didn't struggle.
Her bare feet dragged in the dirt.
They laid her in the road and stoned her.
The first man was her father.
He threw two stones in a row.
Her brother had filled his pockets with stones on the way
there.
The crowd was a hive of disturbed bees,
the volley of stones against her body drowned out her moans.
Blood burst through the sheet like a patch of violence.
A hundred roses in bloom."
Thank you guys for listening.
[AUDIENCE CLAPPING]