May 2007
Somewhere, Mustafa knows, he has a twin brother,
an American soldier with wheels for legs
a man who stands for nothing,
a man who is no longer a man
who urinates through a tube into a bag,
an American digging into the bureaucratic rubble of his government
trying to unearth something human,
trying to locate a surgeon’s fingers to reset the clock of his life
and point him forward.
If irony were iron,
Mustafa’s back would have held
when four years ago today
the force of a US missile swept him like a branch from his roof
and dropped him two stories below in his garden.
If irony were bread,
a small round of dough, pounded, stretched, flattened
and thrown on a fire,
a bowl of hummus dribbled with olive oil,
a cool yogurt and cucumber salad,
Mustafa would never be hungry here in Amman.
For three years he rolled his chair through Baghdad –
one more broken body bent to its wheel –
and along concrete and barbed wire barriers that line the Green Zone
seeking reparation for his injuries.
I left no door unknocked, he says.
If irony were justice,
the U.S. military would have given him more than a letter:
Mustafa Samir Hassan was injured
when a missile exploded near his home
in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad on April 3rd, 2003 . . .
It would instead have given him:
anesthesia, scalpels, transfusions, trained fingers, aftercare.
Somewhere, Mustafa knows, there is a clinic
with doctors who can repair his back,
who can reorient his life toward the future.
But for now, he is still trying to learn about this war from his television,
still climbing a ladder to fix an antenna on his house in Baghdad,
still falling
like a long-stemmed glass
to hard ground.
If Irony Were Justice
Blood at the Wrist
First Day in Amman
Thay Reach Us
I was the Earth
Ammar's Story
