I Ought
for Margaret Hassan, Care International aid-worker murdered in Iraq written after a Christmas Party at the historic Brown Palace, Denver, Colorado, in my capacity as a corporate wife.
I ought to be happy in an evening dress.
I ought. I ought.
Even as the battle in Fallujah & Baghdad is fought.
Even as I count the cost of warring
Even as Margaret Hassan cries out:
I am lost.
I am lost.
The dress in Foley’s was marked down as I waited.
The death is scandalous.
They will not write about her: the martyr
She was nine parts of our desire.
In velvet, the night stole across her shoulders
The dress drops in tiny beads around her neck.
They will not say for a glimpse, the men have
leapt across the boulders. To retrieve the jewels
Plunged between her breasts, they were crushed
luminescent. They will not say silk spitefully
beckoned the men, seduced them with a trailing
hand. For a price, her midriff has been reckoned.
Omniscient. I think not.
Gandhi’s spinning wheel
is not unfurling a single
flag. I think we are all
equally lost. The men
dying for her, are lost.
And those who are not.
Those who counted the
Cost. And those who did
Not.
It’s not. It cannot be.
A most Merciful God
The munificent Allah
The Alpha or the Omega.
I don’t see the door.
Open mouthed I stare-
Arjuna, the cupboards
Of redemption are bare.
I am not Job, a righteous man
To talk. Only miles of dessert
sand in the palm of one
hand. The battle lines are drawn
in tongues to stalk her footprints
are hard to follow, both hands
tied behind the back, look!
in the winds of tomorrow
I am lost.
The evening dress I bought is black
Margaret Hassan’s body is in a sack
The kick pleats are at the back.
What comes to mind is not her pert behind. For a
Poem, I was resigned to writing odes of beauty.
For a sermon, averting my most lustful eyes,
Scrolling her slender frame, I ask
And where is that beauty in a frightened heart?
And what lies ahead, in a fistful of poems?
Pull, pull out the troops, please, please,
Make the war cease, cease
And in my heightened state of awareness
A state of grace sadness, I roll my paper
And the pen across the floor.
11
“Margaret are you grieving over golden grove unleaving?”- Gerald Manley Hopkins
Somewhere among the dead poets, there is a fall
Among the colored leaves of the manuscript, the
Nondescript men are renting tuxedos’, their
Women modestly covered are waiting in the hall
And Margaret Hassan, are you there?
Somewhere beyond the words engraved in cement
Does your soul dressed in shades of green satin, lament
‘Where is the man who can ease a heart like a satin dress?”-Dorothy Parker
There is no more or less pain
I don’t know who gets more or less wet in the rain.
I ought to be happy wearing an evening dress,
I ought,
I ought.
It will be something to write about.
