The "Paul Harvey" of War

I have a good imagination; it serves me quite well. When someone says to me, “You can’t imagine . . . ,” I say within myself, “You have no idea of what all I can imagine. Yes, I can imagine what you suggest is beyond my ability to envision.”

But there is something I can scarcely imagine: what it would be like to be living in Baghdad, as an ordinary citizen, across these last two or three years, trying to find a way to go on about living, as much as possible (impossible), a normal kind of life. That horror is, for me, unimaginable.

I was born in 1934 and have lived in the United States through WW II, the Korean, Vietnamese, Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars. I have never missed a meal, have lived in a comfortable home, walked the streets without fear, and heard the sound of guns only when I went hunting.

Wislawa Szymborska was born in 1923 and has lived in Poland through WWII, and a continuing series of warlike violence throughout the years that have followed. Belligerent Russia and menacing Germany have kept Polish life unstable and unpredictable.

In 1996, Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The following poem is rooted in her lived reality, not her imagination, although she gave it its imaginative form. The story of war has been told many times by historians, novelists, and movie producers. Szymborska tells “the rest of the story.”
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“THE END AND THE BEGINNING”

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall.
Someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.
No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little,
And less than that,
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.