This has more international setting, different kind of war,
"The General's Briefing."
This is a list until the very end, anyway, it's a list.
"The General's Briefing."
"Here's the infant formula plant,
missed by a hair's breath.
Next to it, here's the biological research facility
bombed with advanced machinery of pinpoint accuracy.
Here are the small women and large babies,
the medium sized women with tiny children,
and the large, the tall women with shrinking babies.
And here are the former apartments,
and the former neighborhoods.
And here's the dirty, famous, polluted, well-known,
historically besieged, important river
that ran the commerce, throbbing in the belly of the city.
Here are the candlesticks of the mosque.
Here are the pre-dawn musicians, here's dawn.
Here's the all clear.
Here are the radio waves, the telecommunications antennae.
Here are the rats.
Here's the dysentery.
Here's the one doctor.
Here's the vial of medicine for the population.
Here's the international community to rebuild the city.
Here finally, is the city, the dry faucet, the endless alloy
pipe, the rose plume, over the scarlet plume,
over the yellow plume, over the charcoal, over the flames.
Here's the eyewitness.
Here are his notes, his swollen pad,
here's his tooth-marked lead pencil, his press pass,
his signature.
Here are the letters of his whole name.
Here are the vowels separating from the rest, the tender
e, the demanding u, the sorry o, and the a
and i suddenly very close, intimate in fact,
given the circumstances of no air, no water, no electricity,
no society, no geography, no say, no information, no.
Here's the audience, the couch, soil, the telephone
wire to the living room, the Super Bowl on TV,
the background of epic winter sky,
the letters recycled, practice jets, the speed of sound,
the traffic, Sunday shoppers with their imported
and domestic cars tuned to the war,
the clerk at Circle K tuned to the war,
the anti-war demonstrators with their headsets
tuned to the war, the Super Bowl commentators,
making an exorbitant fee, tuned to the war, the police guarding
the stadium, the FBI rooting out possible terrorists,
the boys growing mustaches to be terrorists,
the terrorists feeling death's high.
Here's the answer, here's the Pope, the minister,
the president, the representative of the people.
Here's the student, the official.
Here's the quarterback.
Here's the servant, here, here.
Monday night, don't you see us on the shelled road out of gas,
without our masks, money, without our credentials?
We sense you, your eye in the high tech telescope as one
throws back her stringy hair from his forehead,
and another rubs her throat waking it.
The only thing missing from your screen,
your vision, out of earshot, the smell
of so-called immortal souls, immortal Earth,
fruit ripe and ready for market, baths ended abruptly weeks ago,
the last of the drinking water.
The only thing missing from your enormous awareness
on the screen, the smell, as when one meets the great love
of his life, the same yellow hair she imagined,
the very same speech, same touch, and cannot,
the same upturned lips, and cannot.
The smell, as one hears her child and cannot.
The smell, who has slept all night, the sheets cold and wet?
The smell, silence, suddenly electronic
professional governmental silence.
The smell, whitewashed walls on all sides infinite.
The smell, desert trenches, a face, a leg.
The smell, red hills, anxiety, our heads held up on sticks.
As I speak from a third floor room,
the smell throughout the city, the country the region,
diarrhea, and puke, and mineral dry heave.
No salt for tears, no sea for sewage."
[APPLAUSE]