The World's Saddest Song Remains the Same "how long, how long must we sing this song?" -- U2 A roadside billboard in my town says, "Pray for Ukraine," and I want to. In the UN they give speeches, but BAROOM!!! the bombs continue to fall on city buildings, smoke and flame fill, light up our screens, And we've seen this horror movie before: correspondents in body armor and helmets counting explosions -- cut to rescuers digging rubble, Pulling bloodied civilians out onto stretchers -- cut to people in chaotic queues on train platforms, children everywhere, some families bringing their dogs, And I want to help them onto the train, give candy to the child, tell the harried conductor he's a good dog, will cause no trouble, but I can't be there -- but I can't close my heart To what I see. And I can't look away because I know war: how thoughts travel one day to the next thinking of death, how waking is just another day of death, laughter so rare It is a shock, like a bomb, when you hear it, your chest so constricted against gloom you can hardly join in, and I don't want people to die, and I don't want people to live this way, but I can't go and give any real help, any more than the foreign ministers and politicians giving speeches, so I will pray, pray for Ukraine. I remember a ruined Russian tank, half-submerged on a bank of the Kabul River, left there like an open-air museum piece, left there when the Russians withdrew. So I pray for Ukraine, and I pray for the day when every tank in our world is just a left-behind museum piece. Iraq Diary I Sky’s pink beginning of darkness in thick dashboard glass, a tonal pop starting every radio sentence, our vehicle halts in the dust that floats, always, over MSR Tampa like death, waiting to settle, corner of the eye movement in sudden wind. Iraqi cars swerve away from us, same pole magnets as roads merge, our vehicle’s gunner looking for a ghost, pointing at each car, ready to fire belt-linked rounds into the VBIED that waits for us here – it’s been days, but, always, it’s only days before it’s reincarnate, pieces of metal reassembled, same dusty car torn, we saw it, can’t forget it, torn apart in the last sand-fire explosion. For the gunner to miss its quick dart, not pull the trigger, means our death, again. II A boom felt so much as heard, puffs of smoke blown instantly out of sandbagged windows, the sick feeling in the gut, heaving, hearing like underwater now knowing absolutely like ESP, like Newton’s laws that someone has died. Clouds of sand roll over the line of t-barriers that has stopped most of this blast’s shock. Minutes later men are running, “Are you okay, are you good?!” On the other side of the barrier wall, at the gate to MSR Tampa – later, the wreckage of bodies will be gathered into black vinyl bags by unlucky soldiers – DNA trusted to match the parts. III Laundry pickups “Three to Five Days” later, if there is time to drop it off before the third country nationals lock the door, board their bus for the other side of camp. My friend lives in a dirty uniform, coming straight off dusty roads, still in body armor, kevlar helmet tucked into an arm, to wait the long line, call home: “I am alive” the understood meaning of “it’s me.” I start counting -- every third day the average, “No Phones, No Computers” taped in the door glass of the MWR. “Someone has died” the understood meaning. IV At night a crowd gathers at the MWR’s tv to watch curling, Winter Olympics oddly popular, some soldiers standing to imitate the frantic brushing while the stone moves easy, like exhaled breath down a steadied gunsight, to a contact where a contest winner is all the future that’s determined, the arena so free of dust, desert flies, the quiet game graceful in its efforts like the strain of a ballerina, so civilized, like the ceremonial ringing of a peace bell, a heavenly echo floating over a manicured garden. A War Photographer Goes Home When he found himself wanting only beauty it slowed him. Staring out the open window of a dusty white Toyota sedan at terraced olive fields on a sunny hillside, a sagging felt headliner rippled by wind brushing his head, he just sat. The three with AKs who jumped out first looked back at his reverie, waiting, to take him to the rubble-strewn village. Yesterday a child touched his arm, mother lying dead on the shaded street, dust of her fall hovering in air, the familiar percussion sounds of 55mm grenades close as the sniper. Down the block smoke scent rising in sunlight. And he couldn't train his camera to take a shot of her, instead kneeling to say "habibi" to the child in broken Arabic. Maybe he was idealistic once, in Bosnia, fired by stories of journalism school, finding that one "Napalm Girl" photo that would become an international, explosive knowing. Soon, it was just competition, the race to hotspots, swapping information with cynical diplomats, seedy hotel bars. Staying. He who estranges his family best wins. But suddenly he sees the brown lands and gray mountains, all the murder thy neighbor countries, only landscapes of bones. For years the photos were people around him. Now a crazy moan is starting in him, deflagration of the countries stilled in his moments become an awful remembering. Always he refused to look away, now a whiplash of seeing too much. Later, he stuffs this pain in a hasty duffel. As the plane rises from Beirut International, the Middle East's shadow fades and he looks down on his dull suburb of cut lawns, deciding to take the job at the college, repair a long-distance marriage, play war-junkie PowerPoints to darkened lecture rooms, take an old correspondent's advice: "Don't let the dead into your soul." Absolute Time, Uyuni, Bolivia Where time's a wave of dry wind across a salt pan desert, particles of sand clothing giant, driving-wheeled cylinders -- empty fireboxes awaiting shovels in yesterday's hands, broken glass Bourdon gauges stuck in a synchroscope loop of boiler pressure zeros – like Zen masters, locomotives powering Bolivia's economy to a new industrial age stopped, rested on their tracks -- as if hearing energy can never move faster than light, squat in an acolythate entropy of rust under the daily, victorious sun, aware: their silent tracks still move with the eternal earth, spinning forever into the future, a thousand miles per hour.
A US Army combat veteran, Steven Croft lives happily on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation and home to various species of birds and animals. His poems have appeared in Liquid Imagination, The Five-Two, Ariel Chart, Eunoia Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Synchronized Chaos, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
