CONFESSION ZERO (The Weaver's Song)

She eyes the richness of faces longing for home, rucksacks and rifles tossed over slumped shoulder, traces of flags and banners and wood; fruitless. This flight out will be the last toward survival. She will not be going, she still looks for her children, she is citizen of the killing zone. Her husband’s fate went uncounted from the outset of steel-humanity’s broil. Saddam broken, alive, murderer waits, tamed in a ruler's land by would-be king of another.

She smiles upon them as they exit breathing sighs of relief danced in mourning. What will become of the roses and the waters? The ancient ruins, the culture shattered? Might it request another day of its soul? Will this become death’s chart and dark-boiled lure? (A few of sands ruddy cheeked questions birdsong aloft of the broken firmament.) She smiles and waves goodbye to friend and foe, liberator and murderer, husband and wife, brother and sister, uncle and aunt, love and hate.

A distinct, sudden, and brief click sensed under the engine's breath over a moment of moistness and the blinding flash.

Teach us something, if you don’t we’ll not know that this war never ends, that we will be breathing the eternal war of our forbearers. We’ll not know that we exist in the bomb-tripped retaliation of hostilities not taught in history books or churches, not discussed at town hall meetings or in our homes. A history that will be neighbor to our children’s duration, whose marrow will be dust settling upon their bitter air of which their children breathe and envelop its despair.

How much more will it take for us to tell the truth, to teach the truth, to sing the truth, to change our “truth”?

We are a rigid-plated contraption, our engine’s dry of a useful knowledge, we are bred as a warring machine, the blades of our rhetoric based on lies, bullets in our history stamped “friendly fire”, arias of aggression harmonized to a drunken two-step. Our feet at birth tap out its refrain, our hands move in trigger-pull simulation, minds filled with jingoisms and fast food and television. And our trees are cut down to reveal a conjured bogeyman.

Teach us something, if you don’t we’ll not know that this age had a beautiful march for freedom, that our treachery was not the status quo, that the Iraqi people were not monsters. We’ll not know that the men and women wearing the uniform were conned by an amoral group of ruffians. Teach us raw fact, dismantle our hardened armor, oil our dry engines with veracity.

Let us breed, not war, but peace. Teach us that.

I dreamed I had colossal hands. I mean the size of hope!

Someone asked, “Are those your hands?” and I said, “No. I wish they were, my friend… If I had hands that big I would have held Iraq before the war and kept her children in. I’d have put her in my hands and ran so far away! Away from empire! Away from conquerors and maddened men! And while I ran I’d have held her close near my ear and I’d have learned to speak her language, and heard her people dear.”

Then someone asks, “What of Saddam and his sons?”

And I say, “I’d Leave on a ranch, I'd have dropped them off In Crawford, Texas! I hear brush is cleared there more than not!” Then my hands started to shake and I heard the people in them begin to slake, `Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! الحريه الحريه الحريه الحريه A small boy then stood upon my wrist and declared to me, `You can put us down, my friend, we are finally free…’ يمكنك ان تضع'نحن الان علي صديقي. نحن احرار

I awoke suddenly! I could still hear the echoes of `freedom’... My hands trembled.