I'll read that longer poem that Taylor had mentioned,
"Two Thousand Pounds," and there were some students in a class
today-- really wonderful class-- so we got
to meet the students and stuff.
It's a longer poem, but 2,000 pounds was really inaccurate.
After investigation, they found it was 800 pounds,
but it had been published as 2,000--
I didn't know what to do.
[LAUGHTER]
You what I mean?
But 800's a lot, you know?
Still a pretty big poem.
This poem, I tried to use the traffic circle, which
is a predominant feature in Iraq because seemed inclusive.
It seemed like a good place to go about this--
because there are roadside bombs all over the place.
Usually under overpasses because you
get secondary ricochet shots and concussion injuries and stuff.
It's a better place to place a bomb.
But oftentimes they are in traffic circles, as well.
And this poem tries to using a cinematic technique--
verse stanza by verse stanza, panning around the circle.
I hope you will see what I mean.
"It begins simply with a fist--
white-knuckled and tight, glossy with sweat.
With two eyes in a rearview mirror watching for a convoy.
The radio, a soundtrack that adrenaline
is pushed into silence replacing it with a heartbeat.
His thumb trembling over the button.
A flight of gold, that's what Sefwan thinks,
as he lights a Miami, draws in the smoke,
and waits in his taxi at the traffic circle.
He thinks of summer 1974, lifting pitchforks
of grain high in the air--
the slow drift of it, like the fall of Shatha's hair.
And although it was decades ago, he still
loves her-- remembers her standing at the cane
break where the buffalo cooled, shoulder deep in the water,
pleased with the orange cups of flowers he brought her.
And he regrets how so much can go wrong
in a life, how easily the years slip by.
Light as grain, bright as the streets concussioned of metal.
Shrapnel traveling at the speed of sound
to open him up in blood and shock--
a man whose last thoughts are of love and wreckage
with no one there to whisper him gone.
Sergeant Ledouix of the National Guard speaks,
but cannot hear the words coming out.
And it's just as well his eardrums
have ruptured because it lends the world a certain calm.
Though the traffic circle is filled with people running
in panic, their legs a blur like horses in a carousel--
turning and turning--
the way the tires spin on the Humvee flipped to its side.
The gunners hatch he was thrown from, a mystery to him now.
A dark hole in metal, the color of sand.
And if he could, he would crawl back inside of it.
And though his fingertips scratch at the asphalt,
he hasn't the strength to move.
Shrapnel has torn into his rib cage,
and he will bleed to death in minutes.
But he finds himself surrounded by a strange beauty--
the shine of light on the broken.
A woman's hand touching his face tenderly,
the way his wife might.
Amazed to find a wedding ring on his crushed hand--
the bright gold sinking in flesh, going to bone.
Rasheed passes the bridal shop on a bicycle with Sefa
beside him.
And just before the air ruckles and breaks,
he glimpses the sidewalk reflections
in the storefront glass.
Men and women walking and talking, or not.
An instant of clarity just before each
of them shatters under the detonation's wave,
as if even the idea of them were being completely destroyed--
stripped of form.
The blast tearing into the mannequins who stood as though
husband and wife a moment before,
who cannot touch one another, who cannot kiss,
who now lie together in glass and debris,
holding one another in their half-armed embrace and calling
this love--
if this is all there will ever be.
The civil affairs officer, Lieutenant Jackson,
stares at his missing hands, which make no sense
to him, no sense at all.
To wave these absurd stumps held in the air,
where just a moment before he'd blown
bubbles out the Humvee window.
His left hand holding the bottle,
his right hand dipping the plastic ring in soap,
filling the air behind them with floating spheres,
like the oxygen trails of deep ocean divers.
Something for the children, something beautiful.
Translucent globes of their iridescent skins drifting
on vehicle exhaust and the breeze that might lift one
day over the Zagros mountains--
that kind of hope.
Small globes which may have astonished someone
on the sidewalk seven minutes before Lieutenant Jackson
blacks out from blood loss and shock, with no one
there to bandage the wounds that would carry him home.
Nearby, an old woman cradles her grandson,
whispering, rocking him on her knees,
as though singing him to sleep.
Her hands wet with their blood.
Her black dress soaked in it, as her legs give out
and she buckles with him to the ground.
If you'd ask her 40 years earlier if she could
see herself an old woman begging by the roadside
here with a bomb exploding at the market among all
these people, she'd have said, "To have your heart broken one
last time before dying, to kiss a child given sight of a life
he could never live?
It's impossible.
This isn't the way we die."
And the man who triggered the button--
who may have invoked the prophet's name or not--
he is obliterated at the epicenter.
He is everywhere.
He is of all things.
His touch is the air taken in-- the blast and the wave,
the electricity of shock.
His is a sound the heart makes quick
and the panic's rush, the surge of blood
searching for light and color.
That sound the martyr cries filled with the word
his soul is made of--
Inshallah.
But still hanging in the air over Ashur Square,
telephone lines snapped in two--
crackling a strange incantation the dead hear
as they wander confused amongst one another,
learning each other's name, trying to comfort
the living in their grief.
To console those who cannot accept such random pain,
speaking habib softly, one to another there in the rubble
and debris, habib over and over, that it might not be
forgotten."
How are you guys doing?
[APPLAUSE]