Fallujah

Warplanes targeted and bombed
Fallujah’s main hospital homes humans
helicopters collide with rockets flame in balls
and fall from fuming skies

“A thirteen year old child
just died
in my hands”
said the doctor
who escaped arrest for healing
but could not escape siege
“we are running out of medical supplies…
not a single surgeon in Fallujah…
scores of injured civilians
trapped in their homes”

A father,
“My son got shrapnel in his stomach
when our house was hit at dawn
but we couldn’t take him in for treatment.
I watched my
nine year old son bleed
to death”

The children who live are
traumatized, shaken as Fallujah to the bones,
a city fallen, jolted shaking as structures fall
ripped from fabric tattered bleeding from a core
maimed shattered dying

as in Bagdhad always
bombings daily
bombings daily
persist intensify
and explode new waves
with the Fallujah assault

whether reported November 2004 by Aljazeera from Falluja,
or March 2003 by Robert Fisk from Baghdad

shrapnel pierces spine
a girl age five.
She is numb
on her left side.
Her other half
feels twice
the pain.

Feet
of another girl
bleed bright red
soaking bandage and bandage
and bandage. How many
days of bleeding
before feet rot
or there are no more
bandages?

The girl’s mother hurts
in her heart
and in her chest, too,
where multiple shrapnel wounds
have maimed her.

Feet, legs, spine, chest,
abdomen, lower bowels.
war reduces humans
to body parts
faceless
piles
of collateral damage.

Who will sift through the rubble?
Who will offer the last flimsy bandage
to the survivor at the bottom of the heap?

When will we call each other
human recognize as human
our soil and prayers
our textures of sand loam stone
our rhythms melodic harmonic
our differences multiple matters
of spirit blood breath notes flesh tones
human richly human

Somewhere today in Fallujah
a girl celebrates her sixteenth birthday.
But it is not
a sweet sixteen.

--Diana Tigerlily, 2004