The Rude Pundit - A Poem for Memorial Day
From Rob Densmore, who was in Afghanistan with the U.S. Navy from 2004 through 2007, and later returned as a freelance journalist, a bitter, angry poem titled "A Taste of Afghanistan":
City sand has its own taste
Not the countrys dust,
But darker.
Its stronger bitter parts
Under infantry foot.
Under 500 years going and coming.
Kiplings finest up and over
Through the pass,
Through the places where soldiers stood
In stolid white snow.
Cemeteries in the pass where Alexanders own
Fell on the square rocks.
Paved with smoothed over river rock,
This open grave white, bare.
Kabul sand polishes everyones edges.
Tajiks sharp on the cusp
And Northern Alliance coming down
Hard in the fray.
They all want each others throats.
Their wives lost in the fight
Save for pointed heels and
Gold bangled over fine red henna.
Eastern sand and southern sand,
Pakistan sand crooked as broken teeth,
Herati sand pure and rising to the top.
Nothing mixes and there is no space in between.
If God loved this place he doesnt now.
If He breathed in the brass bullet casings
And the diesel air and spiteful prayers.
A place for lust and dirty children
And the things night can hide.
What things grown men can hide-
In the dark corners of their own childrens rooms.
In the big shadows of a capital with no master and no disciple.
No scope for all things to come together
The sand and the dust and the dirt that makes things grow-
When it is left alone.
But weve put our fingers in it
And the stirring and stamping wont leave
Much for the growing.
Dust bowls and cyclone air will take the rest.
Every village is filled with it now
Dust from our bombs and inside our APCs.
Dirt scrubbed from our rifle actions
And ground into our sweaty palms like Mississippi silt.
And still nothing grows.
Ive taken a knee in seventeen villages
On street corners and broken down roundabouts,
On highways and in shattered homes.
On helo pads and plywood chapel steps,
On the backs of dead men-
And screaming vile women.
They will, all of them, bend or break
It is either them or me.
Its either winning or losing
And putting in its place
What does not belong,
Sand of a different taste and hue
That cannot tell me it is sorry.
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