Now I'm going to tell you a little secret.
It's not going to be a secret in a minute.
I've had an interesting experience during the last six
months, and this experience has led
me to open a lot of boxes in my house.
And in those boxes, there are lots of bits of paper
and manuscripts and books and photographs and mementos
and unfinished poems, bad drafts, bad poems,
lots of things.
I've been battling cancer for six months
and going through the usual things
that we all go through when we have to do that.
And one of the things that occurred to me
was, among many things, I thought,
I better take care of my boxes now.
I better hurry up and do that.
And so I began opening things, and I found a lot of notebooks.
It was rather beautiful to find these things.
And so I'm writing a memoir.
I'm writing really fast now.
I'm trying to write poems and prose,
and so I want to share one little excerpt
from a notebook with you.
This is the last Beirut poem, and it is from--
my husband worked for Time Magazine.
He was a photographer stationed in Beirut,
and I was working for human rights organizations in Beirut
at the time.
And we came under shell fire for a week,
so this was a little bit of that time.
It's a notebook entry, but it might be something else.
I'm not sure.
So here it is.
It's very immediate.
It's not shaped.
It's from a notebook, 1984.
"This had once been a nightclub in Ras Beirut--
broken piano, Scheherazade walls,
women wearing veils but nothing else, all with the same body.
All night, then all night, and the streets iced green
by blown glass, a rack of clothes in a fingering wind,
staccato of an occasional Kalashnikov,
the initials of militia.
This is my worthless identity card, these my dying batteries.
That one, drunk, is tuning his shortwave
into bits of world, Radio Frankfurt, radio split, what
was once Yugoslavia, Radio Crete, what was Leningrad, no
New York.
February 11, the nuclear weapons on the Sixth Fleet
ordered to higher readiness.
Cordite-laced wind, and the one who would soon
be chained to a radiator is making
notes to himself, Charlie Glass, ABC News, and the one
who shared satellite access with me, Terry Anderson, Associated
Press.
And all night, the trees burned so that birds
couldn't land in them.
There was no water in the pool below us,
so there could be no face.
All night, we were shelled where the sea could be heard.
Many-storied apartment blocks flattened into a pastry
resembling what the French called mille-feuille.
Sandbagged hotel, live telephone,
taped glass, crates of gold bullion, Kalashnikovs,
and cognac, making these notes by matchlight.
It is as if I am not here but in Paris,
walking under the sawed-off trees.
What was worth this, a prayer call, paradise?"