Yep, you heard right. Anne Garrels reported the story from Baghdad on NPR this morning. A group of university students, led by a young woman in a headscarf and tight jeans, set up a colorful tent in Baghdad where Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds risked their lives to read their poems to one another, slam style.
The poems were lamentations for those lost, pleas for peace, a few were romantic, a brave and brazen act given the increasing fundamentalism there. Some were long and lyrical, others short and piercing. They were bridges, these poems.
It would be easy to say these were cries of hope. I, however, think they were much, much more. They were weapons. Weapons against madness, against hatred, fear, weakness. Any man can fire a gun. It takes a lot more courage to stand in Baghdad, in the open, and fire off a poem.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
Above is a sculpture in the main square of Piran, Slovenia. Right is a photo of Italian soldiers during WWI on a mountainside in Kobarid, in the Julian Alps (Caporetto in Italian.) They have just heard the whine of a bomb and looked up just before it landed on them. The photograph survived; the men didn't. Close to 800,000 men died there in a two year battle between the Italians and the Austro-Hungarian empire. This was where Hemingway was an ambulance driver and what inspired him to write "A Farewell to Arms."
It is so hard to imagine such lives. I take my freedom for granted almost every day.
That photo is haunting.
Posted by: Janice (5 Minutes for Mom) | November 03, 2006 at 09:29 PM