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The Trading of Souls

"Sometimes, I feel like we’re standing in line
for a ticket, waiting to die."
An Iraqi who worked for a U.S. organization, quoted
in The New Yorker, March 24, 2007

It's an old war, a sold war: our dusty boots march
door to door; we seek enemies and friends at gunpoint.
When blood was applied to the doorposts, they passed by.

Lift the sheets, reveal the women and children cowering.
Their men disappear into the night, tortured with drills,
shot in the head, hands tied with nylon behind their backs.

The blood of first-born animals will protect the children.
Chicken blood, lamb's blood, the blood of a young goat.

A Knight Templar's monument, cross emblazoned on his tunic,
hands crossed, legs crossed, a faithful hound under his foot.

The heroes are honored with Purple Hearts, the president's
effigy, our father on the dollar, moolah, pyramid with all-
-seeing eye. And Jesus cleared the temple of moneylenders.

Suspected terrorists waterboarded, bound with nylon ties,
subject to the gnashing teeth of snarling German shepherds.

Blazing oil wells, a golden temple, its dome bomb-wrecked,
a dictator's justice replaced with another kind of justice,
the meted laws of gangs and radical imams. Wailing women.

And another type of god will rise from the desert, a different
type of hope: a scarred and grimy fist will grasp tomorrow.

Christopher T. George

Dear Christopher ~

This resonates
with an immediacy
too intense,
too raw and
too multi-layered
for me to respond,
except to thank
you, for feeling
and writing it; for
delineating the dynamics,
and daily realities,
of these massacres,
your images graphic, searing;
and for your tender
and respectful
humanizing of these
victimized people.
Thank you.

Thank you, too,
for your recognition
of hope... there is
a book written by a
survivor of the Holocaust camps,
a woman, Halina Birenbaum,
a writer, poet, and translator,
born in Warsaw...
her book is sub-titled
"A Personal Documentation of Nazi Terror."
At Birkenau, in August 2006,
I was immediately drawn
to and bought it
first because of its title,
and second because of
the ways she lives her life.
Your poem affirms
the universal truth
of her book's title,
"Hope Is The Last To Die"


Love,
Elizabeth

Thanks, Elizabeth.

Chris

The Trading of Souls is so apt for the situation in Iraq... and American foreign policy... don't get me going...

After 9/11 I had hoped that the President's response would be one of understanding what was really going on and would not be a knee-jerk reaction... hence my own tirade September Eleven Two Thousand and One...
But I forgot that we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history because we forget...

I remember writing to friends in America at the time that all the Bush Administration had to do was read Irish history from 1750 to 1950 and they could predict what was going to happen. Obviously they didn't and we, over here, with our history of colonialism, and our experience of terrorism, knew what was going to happen and, unfortunately we were right. Mayhem. Fiasco. Disaster. The beginning of the end of the American empire... just as the British declined in the same way... almost a mirror image of what happened a century ago.

You cannot and never will beat terrorism by military means. It is not security issue. It is a political issue. Ask any British Primeminister... except Tony Blair... who didn't read his Irish history...

Was that Santayana:... we are doomed to repeat.. something... something about history!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jimmy