Curfew

Curfew

The wrong is not in the religion;
The wrong is in us.

-- Saier T.


At dusk,
bats fly out by the hundreds.
Water snakes glide in the ponding basins
behind the rubbled palaces.
The mosques
call their faithful in,
welcoming
the moonlight as prayer.

Today,
policemen sunbathed on traffic islands
and children helped their mothers
string clothes to the line,
a slight breeze
filling them with heat.

There were no bombs,
no panic in the streets.
Sgt. Gutierrez didn't comfort an injured man
who cupped pieces of his friend's brain
in his hands;
instead, today,
white birds rose from the Tigris.

The Al Harishma Weapons Market
At midnight, steel shutters
slide down tight.
Feral cats slink
in the periphery of the streetlamp's
dim cone of light.
Inside, like a musician
swaddling a silver-plated trumpet,
Akbar wraps an AK-47 in cloth.
Grease guns, pistols, RPGs --
he slides them all under the countertop.

Black marketeer or insurgent --
an American death puts food on the table,
more cash than most men earn in an entire year.
He won't let himself think
of his childhood friends --
those who wear the blue uniforms
which bring death,
dying from barrels
he may have oiled in his own hands.

Akbar stirs the chai,
then carries his sleeping four-year-old,
Habib,
to bed under glow-in-the-dark
stars arranged on the ceiling.
Late at night
when gunfire frightens them both,
Habib cries for his father,
who tells him
It's just the drums,
a new music,
and the tracery of lights in the sky
he retraces on the ceiling,
showing the boy
how each bright star travels
from this dark place,
to the other.

© 2005 by Brian Turner (Alice James Books, Farmington, Maine)