This Year in Bhagdad

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By Ali Hamden

I saw some footage of the war today.
I feel the war could use a metaphor
Perhaps that man sitting by the street
without a friend
(I suppose you could
Count unemployment, but that’s no good
For sharing a smoke or two).

His final words are tucked into his right pocket,
He thinks: “Perhaps today I will be captured by a rocket.”

The media would play him as a resilient saint who
Is a sign of good winds coming; “Yes!” they shout,
“Our crusade is bearing fruit!” as the mortars fall about.
No, there can be no stories
We cannot depend
on forged glories.
“Good wind” just bids the sand make haste.
It fills you with its taste
So you will even feel how grandiose
The very words that those
Reporters chose to say.

No, he is no Harun al-Rashid.
His is not a world of clear-cut Chinese pages
Of raging despots, rotting wives and striving sages
From some thousand (or so) tales we read
(And steal) throughout the ages.

He hears no voices from the camps of the Bedouin,
Whose verses made soar
The real Baghdad of before
- but they have long since unpitched their tents
And left with all their songs
(Would that I could come along).

He is no mere name
Tumbled from the lips of Sheherezade by accident,
Thrust into desperate tales
Or stock footage of when the muezzin wails;
There are no exotic, erotic scents
Spilling out from under veils
- He’s a real man that bleeds,
He is thumbing prayer-beads
In the shadow of an absent door.

In his world there is no red line between good deed and sin.
There is no single moral to transcend
Or calming words to mark the end
(Thank God! That story fluttered onwards like a dream!)
It would seem
That if he dies, he can read no more.

That is the situation, or so I hear
from the streets of Baghdad this year.

Ali Hamdan is a sophomore Geography Major and Arabic Minor at Middlebury College. He will be studying abroad in Alexandria, Egypt, next year. He hopes to pursue a future as a Cultural Geographer, an Envoy to the Middle East and as a Writer. He speaks English, French and Arabic.