Amman, Jordan December, 2006
More than once
I pulled the black cloth of a night sky
over my head
and over the head of my family
and brought them to safety.
Everyone here knows words can kill you.
The first time we flew,
a handwritten note from al-Qaida
wrapped around a bullet and thrown into our yard
sent us scrambling south, out of Baghdad,
to Samawa,
our five young children like stars
bundled in darkness, pulsing in the back seat
of the car and in our laps.
Cold sweat on a cool night.
The note claimed prophetic powers,
the ability to summon fire and flood –
and the wisdom to direct them –
to summon thunder and wind and landslides,
a stone giant stepping on our house:
Your work supports the enemy, it read.
You are a dog.
A dog’s death awaits you.
At first, Samawa was sunshine, orchard, refuge, riverside reeds,
a place without questions.
We moved unindicted around town,
indistinct
one more group of foraging birds, scratching, flitting,
flirting with relief.
But in February, when that bomb, like a sledgehammer,
crushed the skull of the Askiriya Shrine,
our eight-year-old son, Ali,
eager, bright fledgling,
fell into a snake pit.
When his teacher asked, How do we pray?
he crossed his arms over his chest, Sunni-style,
and bowed:
Like this!
Everyone knows words can kill you.
Classmates pointed at him.
Sunni, they hissed,
and later, on the playground,
a writhing mob, they circled him, chanting
Sunni! Sunni! Sunni!
Everyone knows words can kill you.
Back in Baghdad – O! only weeks later –
another note,
this one from the Mahdi Army, short and pointed:
Leave or we will kill you.
Your house is now for Shia.
Yet a third time we flew,
away from Baghdad
to a dusty farming village where my wife was born
and moved the family, six people,
into a single spare room of her father’s house.
I dug a latrine, and with brick and mortar,
built a pen for the sheep
and every day I took my turn
crouched on the roof with a gun.
But terror is never far.
Coiled, it waits at street corners and in alleys, ready to strike,
ready to swallow the sun.
On eight legs, it crawls into bed with us at night
and with the black mask and black clothes
of the Mahdi Army, it haunts our dreams
and startles us awake, wide-eyed in the morning.
In Baghdad, they stopped a bus my brother rode
and boarded
and pulled him off.
Another brother found his body
three days later at the morgue.
My wife and I spoke.
Life is impossible, we said.
Baghdad burns.
All night it glows.
By day we see the smoke. Day and night
its smell is in our house, our hair,
our clothes.
How long before flames reach us here?
I opened a suitcase
and my children climbed in.
Take us with you!
Look, I have a picture:
Rania and Amal,
contraband, treasure, precious cargo,
packed like twins in the womb of the suitcase,
waiting to be born.
We laughed, but every neuron in my brain fired,
every muscle in my hands and arms longed
to midwife that birth.
I flew without them,
wrapped in reeds along the river,
wrapped again in darkness,
angling for safety in Amman,
but dreaming of Australia and Canada
and America,
of bridges stretched like smiles across bays
of nothing more than a foreign port opening its arms in welcome.
If Irony Were Justice
Blood at the Wrist
First Day in Amman
Thay Reach Us
I was the Earth
Ammar's Story
