April Is The Cruelest....

"APRIL IS THE CRUELEST..."
opening of The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
#69
04-04-03

Odd that this "cruelest" should be running through my head today.
It is April. Rain drops. Cold. We no longer speak of
hail. Now it's "ice pellets." I ask my geology teacher: "Why?"

"Perhaps it sounds more militaristic." That's acceptable in this, the cruelest
month, producing, as it is, a wasteland of western civilization's seed-bed.
Set the Tigris afire, the Euphrates ablaze, annihilate the cradle between

the rivers. It's time for Mesopotamia to be full of craters,
bomb craters, missile holes, unidentified dead bodies, the residues of civilization.
The Taliban blew up Bamian's Buddha, Bush's America blows up Nineveh, Babylon,

Ur, the Chaldeans, the Sumerians, Jarmo, all barely guessed at before
they were nine thousand years in the past, peered at curiously
by the 20th century, blown to smithereens in the 21st, subjugated,

as all things salable, under the price-tag of oil. "Rulers for
Sale" "Countries for Sale" "Presidents and Premiers for Sale" We live
in the bargain basement of a world gone drunk on greed.

It was ever thus in the cruelest world, made so by
the cruelest animal who, lamenting all the while, kills and kills
and kills, letting the desert sands drink the blood of children.

Jan Haag