“Now here you go again, you say you want your freedom,”
The 7th of October, twenty years ago,
not here, far from here, far, far,
Afghanistan-far from here,
began in a rain of missiles launched from land-based B-1 Lancer, B-2 Spirit and B-52 Stratofortress bombers, carrier-based F-14 Tomcat and F/A-18 Hornet fighters, and Tomahawk-equipped submarines and warships;
Operation Enduring Freedom had begun. It lasted twenty years.
The goal: to fight silence; no music played in Kabul. There was no television, dancing, sports, hand-holding, kissing, or human rights and forms of loving. Women stayed home. Men could watch amputations, executions in big stadiums. As for artwork, prayers, poems,
the oral was muffled,
the material blown up.
On the 7th of October, bombs rained with the promise that this would end, this silence. Twenty years later, something ended, but still, everywhere, silence
“Like a heartbeat drives you mad
In the stillness of…”
a longer, much longer, wider than twenty-year history of human barbarism;
the Ottoman army blowing the nose off the Sphinx, Venetian fleets bombing the Parthenon, French archers shooting arrows at da Vinci’s model horse, the Nazis burning Klimts, ISIS looting the Temple of Bel,
tourists haggling for coins and jade, chipping off bits of Iron Curtain, smuggling carpets, peeling frescoes…
Silence,
“… remembering what you had
And what you lost
And what you had
And what you lost”
and people still wanting freedom,
and mining for gold, diamonds, iron, coal, other metals, oil and gas and access and power and those who sell poets will sell God, but
“who am I to keep you down?” To claim to know better, to understand or be able to change anything, small and far away as I am,
far, far, Afghanistan-far away?
I do know that when “when the rain washes you clean,” sometimes it is better to sing,
dance, hold hands, kiss, play sports, pray, run, break the silence, dream,
ring bells, write poems that contain all the love and freedom in the world, or at least as much as poems can without,
bursting,
into tears,
“That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post.”