DEUS EX MACHINA, AFGHANISTAN

by Bonnie Naradzay

Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller speaks during an official handover ceremony in Kabul. Hours later, Miller departed in a Black Hawk helicopter. —The Washington Post, July 12, 2021. Credit: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images via The Washington Post.

The Vietnamese mechanic in the VW repair place 

fixed my car radio today and as I drove off,

I heard the BBC’s news about Afghanistan:

American bombs dropped from the air, in a war

now directed from Tampa, Florida, are killing

the doomed citizens caught in the crossfire 

between the Taliban and the Afghan troops, 

abandoned in what’s called a “civil war,” 

but it’s not. Translators are beheaded now; 

you can read about how we betrayed them. 

The war cost over two trillion dollars, not 

counting the dead, the maimed, ruined lives. 

(“History will not forget it,” Haji Sakhi said, 

as he fled with his daughters to save them from 

the Taliban again.) We turned off the electricity 

in Bagram and left in the dead of night. Who recalls 

the taxi driver, whom our countrymen tortured 

in Bagram, the old abandoned Soviet base, nearly 

twenty years ago? Mr. Dilawar was dead, 

they said, before they cut him down. "Our job," 

explained the last American commander there,

"is just not to forget." His Black Hawk helicopter

lifted him up in a cloud of dust: our deus ex machina.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry salons at a day shelter for homeless people and also at a retirement community, both in Washington DC. Poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review Online, Tampa Review, Tar River Poetry, Florida Review Online, EPOCH, The American Journal of Poetry, Xavier Review, Pinch (Pushcart nomination), The New Verse News, and countless others.

I SHOULD BE ABLE TO WRITE A PROTEST POEM

by Margaret Rozga

Cartoon by Steve Sack, Star Tribune, July 7, 2021

I should be able to write a poem

about Afghani interpreters being given asylum

or rather not being given asylum, being dangled

the delicate hope of asylum for whatever that is worth.

 

Asylum acquired narrow connotations

as in insane asylum, not a refuge

but a silencing, an abandoning.

 

I should be able to write

with the insistent beat of a heart on fire,

the passion of Whitman’s barbaric yelp,

the precision of an accountant

totaling the debt to be repaid.

 

Airlift Afghani allies to the Field Station

where I write of black-eyed susans

counting their thirteen brilliant petals

flower after flower, utterly dependable.

 

We should. I should. What is power for?

What are words for?

 

If they do not set deeds in motion,

if they do not celebrate good,

if they do not open up space,

if they allow moral failure

if they do not uncover names

of the unnamed who throw up

obstacles to justice,

        then

be forever silent.

 

As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Margaret Rozga co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). Her fifth book of poems is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021).

BIRDS OF WINTER 2018

by Mary K O'Melveny

"US withdrawal from Syria will endanger Kurds, Arabs, Christians," —by Amy Austin Holmes, The Hill, December 27, 2018. Photo: Kurdish demonstrators gather to protest near the border wall separating Turkey from Syria in the western Syrian countryside of Ras al-Ain. (AFP Photo/Delil souleiman via Yahoo, December 20, 2018)

This year there is only
rain. Birds, bedraggled by
blowing wind and soggy
air, take no solace in
pumpkin seeds or suet.
Even squirrels have turned
away from our handouts,
as if they know better

than to accept comfort
from temporary stores
of millet and cracked corn,
knowing that our tenure
here is short, that we will
leave these feeders empty
soon enough. Nuthatches,
Jays, Sparrows, Woodpeckers

used to be reliable
friends. Their antics pleased us
as we dispatched more treats,
watched them from our windows
in warmth and safety. Though
we feigned otherwise, we
owned both feast and famine.
How we must have amused

those who watched us place each
scrap and kernel into
wooden boxes and tin
containers, dangle them
from porches and branches,
so sure of flocks to come.
We were eager for praise,
shocked when no one believed.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press.

AMERICAN SOLSTICE

by Peleg Held

Wednesday's surprise announcement that the U.S. will quickly withdraw all its troops from Syria is the stuff of nightmares for many of the Kurds living under the protection of U.S forces and the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). “Everyone is upset, sad and afraid,” one SDF member from the Kurdish-dominant Syrian city of Kobane told Fox News. “It’s a historic mistake. We wanted to be part of America. We are surrounded by enemies, and ISIS isn’t even finished yet.” “Everyone is confused and scared. This will mean that Turkey will likely attack us. We are in shock because we thought the U.S. would help us achieve peace after ISIS. We didn’t think that they would help us defeat the terrorists and then leave us alone to face the horror of Turkish forces and its extreme factions,” lamented Mazloum Kurdy, a 33-year-old father and teacher from Kobane. “Now people are thinking to displace themselves from their homes here again, but nobody knows where a safe place to go is.” In his words, it is an ultimate betrayal by the United States. —Fox News, December 20, 2018. 

 . . . only when the mountains are no more, only when Ocalan’s solitary resistance no longer lights our way is the day we should say “Kurds are no more” . . .    —Hawzhin Azeez


You waver, thinning wisp of a republic,
as the smoke of betrayal is drawn into our chests.
Drift into infamy. You say you are freedom itself
and now no longer owe any promise to liberty.
In Kobane they will grip their fate in their own hands,
in Rojava they will look to the mountains as their only friends.
A great people will once again be backed to the wall
while cowards rub their heels and take
the bows for the sacrifices of others. The watchers
on the walls tonight see you turn your back. Resigned
but not surprised. The only Empire that does not betray
is the one that, clutching the stone of its own delusions
finally sinks under. When your time comes,
as it will, for the last sparks to go cold into the black
earth, no one will come to sing over your ash.
Under a red flag the last architects of Armenia
march to mark your enduring work of this day.
Waver, thinning wisp of a republic
as the smoke of betrayal is drawn into our chests.

Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

MANIFEST DESTINY

by George Salamon

'President Obama’s plan to remove all U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016 “is not a zero option . . . not a withdrawal plan,” the commander of U.S. and international forces there said Wednesday. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. said the plan he expects to implement, following Obama’s announcement last week, is a “transition” that bears no resemblance to the 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Under the plan, nearly 14,000 U.S., NATO and other international troops will remain in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of combat forces at the end of this year.' --Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, June 4, 2014     Image source: Paul Shinkman, US News & World Report

When American forces
leave the rubble of a country
we shake off the experience
and say:
Never Again.

Just not straightaway.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO and contributes to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News.