After the Stealth Bomber

After the Stealth Bomber


by Robert Minhinnick


(Umm Ghada at the Amiriya Bunker)

It is years later now
but time can also run backwards.
Still she squats in candlelight,
Umm Ghada in the caravan,
or in 125 degrees Fahrenheit,
a cockroach ticking on her divan.

At night
they come out of the bunker,
the children, the old people,
but all a fog of flesh.
one body with four hundred souls
is exposed in a photographic flash.
They pick the wedding rings and wisdom teeth
from crematorium ash.

Who was it dreamed a stealth bomber?
Stealth steals.
Think of a smart bomb.
Not so smart.
Where the missiles entered Amiriya
daylight was star-shaped in the sarcophagus,
the concrete blasted back,
all the bodies foaming like phosphorus
in a bunker in Iraq.

The old women
took off their shoes
to welcome the fire that jumped into their mouths.
How quickly the children
found themselves unborn.

Yes, stealth steals.
But still Umm Ghada
guards. Umm Ghada
who goads God
with her grief
and the ghosts she carries,
Umm Ghada my guide
in the charnel house corridors.

What is she but a woman
in desert black.
Yet no desert was ever so black
as the sackcloth that Umm Ghada owns.
Not the Syrian desert's
Bedouin black, its cairns
of cold stones.

• The Amiriya bunker in Baghdad was destroyed by the USAF on 13 February 1991. More than 400 civilians were killed. Umm Ghada, lost many members of her family in the destruction, became a guide at Amiriya, living on the site. I met her there in September 1998. Her whereabouts today are unknown.

Posted over on Guardian, UK