While I’m doing poetry, I thought I’d look back. Here’s a gem from where my mind was 18 years ago.
If I could turn time's hands to days before the quaking of the ground And rewind screaming engines, fires, clouds of concrete and that massive sound We could not be wiser, nor could we imagine sleeping that our fate Might rest between this fiqh or that Islamic dream of mighty Caliphate Could we have known a thousand soldiers born to die a martyr's death Would cross the globe advancing every opportunity to plot our death? We made no time to mind what Sunnis thinks a Shi'ite might be all about And for this lapse a nation's grasp of deadly enemies remains in doubt. Of Hezbollah and Ikwan Of Yemenis and Taliban Zawahiri, Zarkawi, Ahmadinejad Haditha, Mosul, Fallujah, Samarra & Baghdad Sunni, Shi'ite, Alawite, Fatah & Hamas Madhi Army, Baathists & Egyptian Madrassas Tora Bora, Peshawar, Al Jazeera, Al Anbar Dhimmitude & Burkas and I've gone only half as far And half as deep as I must go before I sleep... And in my homeland marching all about the common ground I see A million doubting fingers pointing left and right as if there couldn't be An enemy more intimate or willing to run through the beating heart Of liberty's sweet promise just to jealously defend their party's part Within this house divided may we tell Recalling lives upon that day destroyed The tragedy of why the towers fell The blind sheik's eye, the gaping moral void Remember how we vowed that we'd obey The call of duty rising in us all To honor them defending all the way Our very finest freedoms from the fall So to that end we brandished every sword And used but few available to us Charging ahead on Colin Powell's word To hell with those who won't get on the bus Our Eagle's fury 'venged with wrath but blurred by righteous mourning tears So many dead fell hapless to our shock and awe and mounted muslim fears That we might satiate a hunger to devour nations fueled by christian hate And so joined in the foolish fatwa muslim madmen lining every state They came to fight like lemmings wailing to Iraq after Afghanistan From Syria and Iran hailing, brainwashed brigand boys their first jihad Joined up to displaced Baathists and al Sadr how they ran To meet their doom under the hand of Odierno run roughshod Yet to this tale of desperation we add blue-thumbed voting hope anew For in the truth of liberation there is mighty public work to do Such work begat a Constitution. Iyad Allawi stood before the house With sovereignty delivered now Maliki's bosom wears new freedoms blouse Blind blind my brothers I must protect their ignorant souls from their perverse goals Deaf deaf my sisters mumbling yadda into their decaf, immune from the draft Dumb dumb my cousins sitting on their arms claiming enlightened pacifism Weak weak my neighbors shriek a cowards yellow streak backbiting when I speak All my relatives live in relativism And nobody asks why until they die I cannot finish I cannot stop There is no art in the frustrated hand I can only press forward a new tack Until perhaps they understand There is no turning back