To Sand

To Sand

To sand go tracers and ball ammunition.
To sand the green smoke goes.
Each finned mortar,
spinning in light.
Each star cluster,
bursting above.
To sand go the skeletons of war,
year by year.
To sand go the reticles
of the brain,
the minarets and steeple bells,
brackish sludge from the open sewers,
trashfires,
the silent cowbirds resting
on the shoulders of a yak.
To sand
each head of cabbage
unravels its leaves
the way dreams burn
in the oilfires
of night.


I think it’s important to consider the landscape itself when experiencing a country. Many of my own preconceptions of Iraq were dismantled once I arrived in-country and conducting missions there. We saw most of the interior central corridor of Iraq, from north to south. Of course, the dry and dusty and flat image of Iraq is definitely easy enough to come by. However, I was shocked to find elephant grass and water buffalo and dense vegetation—the river valleys are lush, brimming over with life, and very beautiful.

“To Sand” is the final poem in “Here, Bullet.” When I wrote this, I felt an overwhelming sense that we, as a nation, will not learn from what is happening in Iraq. The sand itself is a process of memory in this poem, washing over and burying the specific, the historic. As the old saying goes — those who do not know their history may be doomed to repeat it.

All of these poems were written in my journals. They were an attempt to remember and to record the personal and the historical I was experiencing while in Iraq. So, even though I often wrote poems of pessimism and poems which investigate pain and loss, I share them because I’m hoping to be a small part of our country’s larger meditation on war.

Maybe we can learn. Maybe, just maybe, when the next possible conflict begins to stir somewhere in the world — maybe we’ll be a great deal more reluctant to jump the gun. Maybe, like in our own homes, we won’t reach for the gun unless we know — without the shadow of a doubt — that there simply is no other alternative for our self-protection, or for the protection of our good friends abroad.

Brian Turner