EYES WIDE OPEN
The little olive-skinned girl
peered up at me
from the photograph
with her eyes wide open,
deep brown beautiful eyes
that bore silent witness
to a grief as old as the ages.
She was young,
and very beautiful, as only
the young can be,
but within such beauty
as bears calamity silently:
because it has run out of tears.
I closed the magazine and went
outside to the wood pile
and split a couple of logs, thinking,
“Her fire is likely
an open fire tonight,
bright flames licking
and waving
like rising pennants in the breeze.”
When I was a boy,
I heard about the bloodshed
in Korea, about the Red Army
perched at our threshold,
and the bombs
that would annihilate our world
forever.
I got under my desk with the rest of the foolish world.
In Okinawa, I wore the uniform
and carried the weapon
until my eyes began to open,
until I choked
on Marine Corps pride,
until I came to realize
just how willfully I had been blind.
How much grief is a life?
And what can be done unless
we stand among the missing, among the murdered,
the orphaned,
our own armed children, and bear witness
with our eyes wide open?
When I was a child, frightened of the night
and crying in my bed,
my father told me a poem or sang,
“Empty saddles in the o-l-d corral,
where do they r-i-d-e tonight.”
Homer thought the dead arrived
into a field of asphodels.
“Musashino,” near Tokyo, means
“Musashi’s Plain,”
the warrior’s way washed in blood.
The war-songs are sung
to the same old marching measures—
oh, how we love to honor the dead.
A world without war? Who but a child or a fool
could imagine such a thing?
Corporate leaders go to school
on Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
“We all deplore it,” the President says,
issuing bombing orders,
“but God is on our side.”
Which blood is Christian,
which Muslim, Jew or Hindu?
The beautiful girl with the beautiful sad eyes
watches, but
has not spoken. What can she
possibly say?
She carries the burden of finding
another way.
In her eyes, the ruins, the fear,
the shoes that can’t be filled, hands
that will never stroke her hair.
But listen. And you will hear her small, soft, plaintive voice
—it’s already there within you—
a heartbeat, a whisper,
a promise broken—
if only you listen
with your eyes wide open.
—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
__________
Sam Hamill: “I grew up on a ranch in Utah, a farm in Utah, and my old man, my adopted father, loved poetry. And he would sometimes recite poetry while he worked. And he would explain to me, the rhythm of the work would help you decide what poem to sort of say. The way you sometimes hum or sing when you work—well, he recited poetry that way, and I think that was what first turned me on to poetry.” (website) Note: Recording courtesy of Michael Ladd. First aired on Poetica Radio, June 23, 2007.
