Dreams and Reality

Misters Bush and Rumsfeld had a dream: clear Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, displace Saddam Hussein, reconcile the warring two or three religious/ethnic groups, impose democracy, and ease Iraqi women toward freedom and a mild Western feminism. This was their dream.

Walt Disney said: “If you can dream it, you can do it.” These men dreamed it and believed they could do it. They dreamed it; they believed it, but have they done it? They have not. At least not yet. Mr. McCain optimistically believes it can be done, at least by the end of the century.

Jan Zwicky, Canadian poet and philosopher, in her poem, “The Geology of Norway,” writes:

A dream
is a carving knife
and the scar it opens in the world
is history.

The Bush dream has carved a virulent and lingering scar in 21st Century history–a festering scar, highly resistant to healing.

After the War

After the war–
There is always the after–
The hills and the fields,
The rivers and the green growing flora
Will recover--
After a century or two.

The corporals and the colonels
Who survive and return to their homes,
The attached civilians who return
The battleground civilians who stay–
Many will not live long enough
To recover.
Even were they to become
Centenarians.

After the war
Trauma lives on.
After the vines and grasses
Emerge green
Through cracks in the rubble,
After: rage, and images
Recurrent will emerge
Dangerous, destructive, and disabling.

After the war.