Their Screams Live in My Ear
Sixty years later, he said
“Then I was the foolish young soldier
Who two days after the atomic bomb
on August 8, 1945
tried to pick up the shadow
of the girl
embossed
on the sidewalk.”
Meekly he continued to say it
Gentle old Japanese man
no longer a soldier
so around the world
people wouldn’t cover their ears
at the screams
of two Iraqi sisters
fifteen and sixteen
(Never knew their names
newspapers never bothered)
slaughtered
by soldiers
who saw a branch move
in the woods
as the girls picked kindle
to warm up the hearth
in the coldest December in
fifty years
“Their screams live in my ears”
wailing over
top volume rock
“We are the champions”
(Master of space, soon to be
Lords of the universe)
issuing from a depleted uranium
shielded tank
as it blindly trumpets its way
through the streets of Falluja.
Their screams live in my ear
Never sleep
Don’t ever nestle comfortably
in the crook of my ear
and resignedly whisper
Raw, like the first day
they roar
to be heard
Angry, unforgiving
Surprised and aghast.
Driving on highway 1 towards Santa Cruz, in 2000 I heard on KPFA the testimony of the Japanese soldier and I had to pull over stop the car and cry. Three years later I remembered that testimony as the war against Iraq was raging and I wrote this poem, which is now in the unpublished collection “Avatars in the Borderlands”.