The Streets of Kandahar

The Streets of Kandahar

The sheets are rumpled,
pillows ragged from the night.
“Tell me there is some end in sight,”
she says, “something I cannot see or hear.”
We have awakened to the news:
jets dropping tons of bombs on Kandahar,
two young Baptists, rescued, confessing that they
have maybe spoken a little about Jesus, have, possibly,
broken the word they gave not
to speak of the man who was a truth sayer.
No irony, only a deep-seated desire to spread
some other person's truth, to spread a “gospel”
which is truth. Sly grins, such joy.



“Tell me we are bombing people for some great truth,
for more than a matter of simple vengeance.”
Two testaments, so many words for truth, for gospel,
so many testimonies they ricochet across the news
and through old texts searched for single lines
to support whatever we might choose. “Is He
on our side?” she asks. “Does His blood stream
in the firmament just behind the cover of B-52s?
The sky seems so red, crimson.”
We watch the stream of refugees,
see men who look alike, some
Hunched over, dragging others.
They all hold the same old book.


So many dead. Towers fall. I have no words,
only images. The pictures flicker, fade out
to a voice over telling us that
we are winning, the evil ones are on the run.
We see what they run from: people wearing turbans,
long beards, flowing brown and gray robes
out of those same old books.
The caves are full of scrolls,
old words from the beginning
of something that stirred in the deserts
and the passes long before we crossed an ocean.
Listen: birds once flew here—
ravens and doves
A man lived here who brought a dream.


BMWs, low-financing, safety-tested.
New cereal with old grains blended in secret.
Humongous sale, DVDs, Gateway. The cows want
us to eat chicken, appear on billboards and T.V.
A woman with a wondrous navel
hawks the latest light beer,
her hips move in ways not often seen.
We bomb culture on a land already rife with culture.
We are killing people.
In the fields, some young woman gleans the wheat,
selects small kernels to feed herself, her baby,
her aging mother. She makes her way through mine
fields, brushes the dust away.
The detritus of another war.


A small boy kicks a ball, another bounces it
from foot to foot then uses the side of his foot
to send it whistling to another. They laugh,
run with joy down dusty streets,
bang the ball from foot to head.
They are not yet dead.
I had supposed they were, that some bomb,
smart or dumb, would land in the streets of Kandahar .
Into the streets of death, children thunder,
backward and forward, screams rise to the sky,
drown out for some brief moment, the roar, the shriek,
the sound of bright machinery.
The great game sweeps overhead. And I am dumb,
can neither speak nor write.
Clouds of dust obscure the sun.



H. Palmer Hall

Posted over on The Literary Works of H. Palmer Hall
(First published in The Texas Observer)