Bert Sacks

Bert Sacks

Mid-life, without fanfare or fuss,
as though it were commonplace,
he traded his engineering career
to become a tree,
and spreading his limbs
found he could span the globe,
Seattle to Basra.

Citing obscure agricultural ordinances,
travel restrictions,
and traditional pest control policies,
federal government threatened
to cut him down.
They cordoned off the space
around him
and gunned their chain saws.
In response, he summoned wisteria
and wild roses
to climb his trunk
orchids to hang from his limbs,
endangered species to nest
in his branches.

Editors, journalists, and members
of Congress sip coffee in the shade
of his ample arbor.
A steady shower of words
like infinite leaves falls upon them,
configurations of leaves
like runes directing them
to Baghdad, to Basra.

Iraqi children,
healthy or ill,
move in his branches,
climb on vines,
clothe themselves in flowers.

David Smith-Ferri

from his book BATTLEFIELD WITHOUT BORDERS

The Unmistakable Imprint Of Love

The Unmistakable Imprint of Love

Saddam General Hospital, Amara –
July 25, 1999

In this sad place, powerlessness
is a voracious presence,
unappeased and pathologic.
It eats flesh,
a bacteria consuming people
from within,
emptying everyone who comes here,
leaving patients, their parents,
the doctors like hollowed reeds.
When the air moved,
we expected a mournful tune.

For three hours this morning,
stopping as planned at each cot,
we walked slowly through
the pediatrics wards,
observing children caught
in the swollen river of sanctions:
tiny bodies tossed by the tide,
hands groping for a root, a branch,
but torn downriver
by the implacable current.
Taking measurements and securing
water samples for analysis,
we calculated the depth of the river,
its width,
the number of feet above flood stage.

At one bedside, I held Hassan,
a featherweight, eight-month old child.
Dying there slowly,
he slept in my arms.
His mother smiled; she spoke to me
directly, in Arabic.
Turning for help,
I felt on every side
the fixed, expectant eyes
of other mothers holding me,
waiting for my response,
even as I waited for her words
to come out of hiding.
Doctor Khammas came across
the room to translate.
She said, ‘If you can heal my child,
please take him with you.’
I struggled to breathe,
and the plain meaning
of those words came from too far away,
came so slowly toward me,
as though swimming through
a great depth of water.
I handed Hassan back to his mother,
who smiled graciously,
without the least cruelty,
and the mothers’ eyes released me,
but the electrical surge
of their desire
marked me forever:
the unmistakable imprint of love.

David Smith-Ferri

from his book BATTLEFIELD WITHOUT BORDERS

Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan

Look at me, George.
I’m the oncology lab report,
the malignant truth metastasizing
every time an American soldier is
injured or killed.
I’m in your lymph nodes,
your bone marrow, your lungs.

Look at me, George.
I’m the murky swamp you paddled into
three years ago.
I’m the eight-inch gash
in your canoe,
the crocodile stepping off the bank,
sliding into the water,
disappearing beneath the surface.

Look at me, George.
I’m the Joshua tree,
gnarled and spiked,
waving you into the Promised Land.
I’m the bristlecone pine two miles
above sea level,
thriving on adversity:
you can’t outlast me.
I’m the river you can’t dam,
the flood you can’t check,
the voice with ten thousand faces.

I’m the indelible blood on your hands,
George.
Take your gloves off,
and look at me.

I’m the pursuer,
and you’re the prey.

David Smith-Ferri

from his book BATTLEFIELD WITHOUT BORDERS

Anywhere, U.S.A.

Anywhere USA

for Shelby West
May, 2006

A local resident, an American soldier,
died in Iraq yesterday
and now
no one speaks against the war.

An eleven year old girl is fatherless
but she cannot lay her grief
at the culprit’s feet.
Her grief is a dead child
strapped to her back.

She knows the creature
who killed her father.
Every night it steps out of darkness
into the daylight of her dreams,
but she cannot curse it’s name,
she cannot exorcise it.

Her anger has no object,
no pointed purpose.
Her rage is a sword locked
in its sheath.
The sharpest phrases die in her,
unexpressed.

Adults speak dully of honor
and service and heroism,
while the impeccable, honorable war,
like a mafia don,
snaps its cufflinks,
narrows its eyes,
and, flanked by body guards,
rides our streets in a limousine,
unseen behind dark
and bullet-proof glass.

David Smith-Ferri

Shelby West is the daughter of Army Master Sgt. Robert H. West. She was eleven in May, 2006 when her father died in combat in Iraq. Thirty-seven year old Master Sgt. Robert H. West, from Elyria, Ohio, died in Baghdad on May 14, 2006 during combat operations when an improvised explosive device detonated next to his Humvee. Robert was a member of the U.S. Army, assigned to the 1st Battalion, 4th Brigade, 78th Division out of Fort Bragg, N.C.

Standing There

David Smith-Ferri


Standing There

After the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
June, 2006

Carried on radio waves,
news of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death
reached me with unexpected force
and in an unlikely place:
a Buddhist monastery.
It is a place where violence,
in any form, is forbidden entrance,
and where vast internal spaces
are mirrored by the boundless
natural landscape.
Nuns and monks, in simple robes,
walk and work.
Radiant peacocks and peahens strut.
Students, aged six to eighteen,
study in a school
that emphasizes character
and asks How can you be of service
to the world?
Above it all, like guardians,
massive oaks and sycamores
spread their arms.

The news arrived as I fastened
my safety belt and suddenly
I felt anything but safer.
Two five hundred pound bombs,
a radio voice said,
enough explosive bite
in their jaws to swallow a house
and leave a house-sized crater
in a date palm orchard.
Like a meteor, I thought.
Sudden, suicidal, alien.

Al-Zarqawi, the disembodied voice
of terrorist threats,
his actual body, broken and bloody,
now a war trophy.

Who doesn’t want to see an end
to terror in Iraq,
an end to exploding cars
and baby carriages,
to looking for missing relatives
in morgues?

I stepped out of my car.
Standing there,
I more than half expected
those great trees to swoon,
the ground to turn momentarily fluid.

Days before, Rachael had told a story.
It seemed simple then.
A bug flew into my eye
while I played soccer.
For a full minute,
I stumbled across the field,
half-blind, frantically blinking,
trying to free the bug,
holding my big,
clumsy fingers at my side.
It was hilarious.
Teammates told me ‘Just kill it,’
but I laughed and blinked
and the bug broke free.

Standing there alongside the sycamores,
I could not reconcile the two images:
on the one hand, the Fighter Falcon
and its ferocious bombs
finding their target
and on the other
the foolish fourteen-year old,
fumbling, finding another way.

Standing there outside
the Buddhist elementary
and secondary schools,
I couldn’t help wonder
which image would flower,
which image would seed our future:
the grown men in the F-16
following orders to kill
or the girl-woman,
following a voice only she can hear.

David Smith-Ferri

from his book BATTLEFIELD WITHOUT BORDERS

Pants On Fire

Pants On Fire

Bought the paper
Looked for my story
They only printed your side
Turned on the TV
Looking for truth there
They’re only playing your lies

You know, You know
You lie

At the butcher
I cut to the quick there
Rumors thicker than flies
At the baker
Tempers are rising
They know the news is a lie

They know, they know
You lie

Streets of Baghdad
Hunkered in bunkers
The boys and girls are alive
But they’re crying
They want to come home now
But you won’t let them
Oh you won’t let them
Survive

Because all you do, all you say
Is a lie

— Paula Franceschi

Posted over on Nicholas D. Kristof's Blog Site

The Dooms of War

the dooms of war

the pomp of stay the course
the obsessive power
of the unswerving must
compel the winless can’t

i cry out from the voiceless who
unable to quell the fervor
of shock and awe
unable to halt the lose of win

such global undoings shame
humiliate, take us back
to the future of never

to the extreme rendition
of our souls

— Gwen Gould

Posted over on Nicholas D. Kristof's Blog Site