Al-Husseini Mosque, Kerbala 1991
In Kerbala, which lay in ruins
Pock-marked, cracked and shattered teeth
Cave-pits of Saddam's shells and poverty's rib-cage
Eight districts in ten destroyed like
Two hands with eight fingers hammered to crushed bones:
In Kerbala
Lies a blue place where earth meets both heaven and hell.
There, tall red-clay grass-stalks
Covered with azure crystal sheaths,
Breath of paradise
Echo prayer with call to prayer -
Prayer sprayed, gelled, pellucid, like a solid fountain;
There, the library stands beneath gold-domed vault
Blue jewel of the Shi'ia, tile-encrusted sky
Kilned limpid into a glistening
Façade of concatenated swimming pools -
Pools of knowledge where scholars dived
And swam, in intricate curling scripts,
Inheritors of Alexandria that the Christians burned,
Where dust once danced but now merely falls;
Gravestone of the prophet's grandson;
There: I feel the wash of history:
A wash of small calm waves on a beach.
Inside lay, one time, the trove:
Curled knowledge, wisdom twisted to look
On its won history, refuge of scholars.
Books that centuries had sedimented
Into a holy of holies that men - all of them men -
Danced to with slow swirling gestures
As curled holy letters called them godward.
Books that bent men with spectacles lusted over
With a lust that stank of imperialism,
But also with the soft fragrance of a desire
Not founded in rape - a will to enter
But on the belovèd's own terms.
I imagine this in the small calm waves,
The blueness of a history that waves in palms;
If not in peace,
Then at least in room
And time and space for beauty.
So I walked inside the mosque,
The al-Husseini, Jewel of the Shi'ia,
Crystal walls of tile-encrusted sky,
On that day, two months after George Bush
Allowed his declared enemy to use helicopter gunships
Against those who rose in hope.
And I saw this:
Here amid the tall clay grass-stalks
Amid the azure tiles kilned harder under shellfire -
The wires of the reading lights hung down as nooses.
The library, empty now of tomes, vitals gutted,
Once the home of script curled back on script
Was a storage place for other curled and twisted knowledge.
The rebellion had pulled down the wires that lit
The faces of the readers, the examiners of texts
To hang
the secret police, the soldiers
the administrators and civil servants
the educated women and the teachers
In droves.
And after the helicopter gunships
The returning functionaries of the Ba'ath
Used the same wires with their coiled and twisted knowledge
To hang the rebellion.
The tiles were blue in the library, mild blue,
The lapis lazuli of soft warm waves of history.
But each tile carried too the shadow of a noose.
It was the meeting of book and burning;
Knowledge not new, but new-reborn,
Offspring of myth's tryst with politics.
Our polite police guide, or guard, or both
Would not allow photographs, saying
"One does not commemorate such horrors".
My Japanese colleague knelt outside
Sought, forehead to the ground,
To cleanse the sanctuary.
I had neither word nor act.
The al-Husseini mosque, azure jewel of the Shi'ia
Stands in Kerbala's shards,
City eighty percent destroyed
City two hands with eight fingers hammered to crushed bones
Ancient city, famed source of wisdom,
Source and font of half of Europe's renaissance,
Its blue-skinned grass-stalks wave softly in the breeze,
Looking down as history's tools slam around it.
And in all this I seek for light and hope
For some small redemption
Reinterpretation, sense-making,
Not for me but for our common future
Where the texture and meaning of blue
And whether curling is for tendril-script or murder
Are yet to be decided.
And I find few grounds for any.
1998