Guantanamo Camp

For Mohammed Sadiq

You’ve lived almost a full life
Eighty-nine years, almost ninety,
Almost a century,
Of work and sacrifice,
In the darkest green of mountains,
Of love and anger, compassion
And finally insanity.
The daily life of common tasks,
The blue skies, the red fiery ones,
The heavy rains and the floods,
The starry nights, the godly
Menace above human suffering,
And, ungodly, the cruelty of continuous
Foreign occupation. The children came,
More hard work, more love and anger,
And the grandchildren. Finally the inability
To think properly and distinguish the true
From the false, a weakness in the mind,
The smile at times of someone who’s lost,
Alone, unaware, and the pretense of happiness.

Imagine one day your own father
Sitting by the door, a cane in his hands,
Enjoying the warmth of the sun,
Wondering about the sound of birds,
The quick movement of lizards, the years
Of memory, the memory of years,
The painful voids of the imagination,
The darkening of a thought, which breaks down,
And the end of thinking. A rift in the soul,
As painful as a sudden ulcer,
A wound that doesn’t heal, but comes back.
And yet the smile also
Comes back at times, and the empty eyes
Are filled again with joy and wisdom.

Then the ungodly, imagine, the ungodly
Noise of aircrafts and bombs,
The unthinking machine of war, the odious
Platoon, all-too-young, removed from the knowledge
Of things and life, the soldiers,
Sent by the most despicable people on earth,
Powerful people, the worst of the worst, (1)
Hitting and thrashing everybody,
To gather intelligence –
Intelligence they say, intelligence they call it.
They arrest him, too. Eighty-nine years of age.
His empty eyes mirror the abyss of the world,
Then they are filled with light again,
Filled with the green, the yellow, the blue of the mountains,
The red and black of history, memory,
And the horror of what lies ahead.

New York, April 26, 2011

(1) This is Donald Rumsfeld's description of the Guantanamo detainees.