War, what is it good for?

That quote always makes me think of that Seinfield episode where Elaine does that stupid thing. Yeah, I can see it in my head but I was never one of those people who quoted tv shows. Just don't have the mind for it. Anyway, it's kind of heavy, but I thought I'd post this poem that a friend helped me sort of revitalize today. We met up at this insane bar in the heart of the city with a huge "garden" out back full of picnic tables and all sorts of good people-watching. Zeitgeist. It was my first time and when I told my roommates that, they were all: "Oh, my god! Have you not lived?" So the poem's long and maybe kinda heavy but the topic's pretty close to me. Basically, how does war fit in? And what do we do with it? Where does it show up?
Autobiography of War (San Francisco)

(Lebanon, summer 1986)

The slow road from the Beirut to the south
spreads the length of the country,
along the beach,
bumper-to-bumper, dented and dirty.

Checkpoints with shacks fresh painted,
soldiers in front, nodding us on, waving us on,
peering in and nodding us on,
asking for papers and nodding us,
questions and nodding.

And after hours spent inside,
in the house’s middle room,
hours playing cards and reading books
while the grownups whisper urgency,
while the world outside booms, low and loud,
the outside world falls away in crumbs,

after the booming stops,
when moms are making dinner,
my cousin takes me to the roof
and we collect bent bullets,
treasures clutched in happy fists.

The next morning a tank rolls down the main street,
right past us on the balcony,
staring down at the beast and eating grapes.

(Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, early 1991)

They say the wives and children can leave;
they send special planes—

we stay.

And when the SCUDS come at night,
Dad is supposed to wake us
and take us
to the safe room in our house,
a room where we are supposed to have canned food and water,
a room with all windows and doors sealed off with tape.

When the SCUDS come at night,
dad leaves us dreaming
and goes up to our roof
to watch American missiles intercept the evil missiles,
like fireworks.

One night an explosion wakes me up;
the low rumble far-off finds me
warm under my blanket, and
the house quivers like a womb.

One day we go to the embassy and
they give us gas masks,
show us how to use them:
“If you put these things on wrong,
You’ll suffocate.”

We play victims for a war drill;
two marines wheel me on a gurney
down the embassy’s long halls.
One curses under his breath: “Fuck…”
It is the first time I hear that word live;
and my eyes
are closed; I am pretending to be dead.

At home Dad helps us put the masks on.
We take photos:
Me and my sister wearing gas masks, wearing nightgowns,
all tangled hair and medical alien faces.

Mom puts the masks on a high shelf.
Some kids bring theirs to school,
strap them on with their backpacks.

For Valentine’s Day,
my best friend puts paper missiles through paper hearts,
writes messages across them in cursive.
Mine reads: “You are my favorite SCUD.”

(Surabaya, Indonesia, May 1998 (& an echo))

Driving home from school,
our car gets stuck in the demos,
in the knots of men and women
filling the streets and the city.

Each demo is a different color—
the day they are first angry,
they wear green t-shirts,
some with green bandanas covering noses, mouths…
They wave sticks, hold signs, yell chants.
The group is a seething green organism.

Our final exams cancelled,
I furiously make out with my boyfriend in a taxicab
before they make us fly to Singapore on
a jumbo jet packed with Americans.

Dad stays and over the phone
he talks about angrier demos,
smashed in windows, looted supermarkets,
a Molotov cocktail thrown over his office gate.

When we come back weeks later
things that used to cost 10 rupiahs
cost 100 now.
We carry stacks of bills.

“The country so sad, it bleeds.”
Dad writes years later, the final time he goes back,
the country seething still.

(New York City, September 2001)

Our first thought is that a pilot made a stupid mistake
on this Tuesday morning,
when we emerge from the subway
And everyone is looking south
at a newness on our famous skyline.

After going to two classes
the idea crystallizes
that something has happened.

Cell phones not working and somehow I find my friends.
An entire city is wandering and crying and staring
and we wander, try to donate blood,
then downtown to a bar with peanut shells on the floor
to drink Stellas and watch CNN.
In Brooklyn that night on the pier
across the water the fallen towers smoke
against a new-starred sky.

We stay in our apartment three days
in front of a tv pulled from the closet.
They are showing
the same thing over and over,
with all possible variation.

We call people we love who are
not here.
We smoke cigarettes, try to write emails, to talk.

But there is difficulty doing things,
in restarting life, going back to Manhattan
where there are “missing” posters everywhere,
candlelight vigils, stricken faces,
a big crater downtown,
a smell my roommate knows as death
each day when the subway passes under it.

(Egypt, April 2005)

At work behind computers and our boss comes into the office to tell us
a man has just blown himself up and killed a few, hurt even more
with a nail bomb
in the middle of the Khan,
among hookahs and scarabs and leather and gold
and tourists
and Egyptians.

When the second bomb goes off,
I am in the Sinai with Lisa and
we have just had the bumpiest, scariest
ride of our lives out of the Rainbow Canyon
with two Bedouins in a four-wheel-drive.

Stopping to fix our flat tire at a sandy way station,
I have text messages from Cairo:
“Have you heard? A crazy man blew himself up
Jumping off the bridge and two women shot at a tourist bus…”

Dad calls from Virginia at sunset and says: always be aware;
we are eating fresh grilled fish, looking across the slow water
at Saudi Arabia as soft purple mountains in the distance.

(Lebanon, summer 2005)

Hariri’s grave under an awning by a monumental mosque
that he was having built in the downtown
he had reconstructed.
He and six bodyguards are now lumps,
covered with Astroturf, draped in white flowers.

I am here for the first free elections, which means
nightly celebrations with fireworks.
The explosions make my stomach flip,
sound like bombs and guns.
I find them in the distance from balconies and rooftops.

The streets are papered with fliers and portraits and freedom graffiti.

And more deaths this summer still
as bombs go off in strategic locations.
The news blares from the tv in my aunt’s tiny apartment,
desperate newscasters and repeated images of split open cars and buckled streets,
groups of young men, arms on shoulders, huddling towards the microphone.

We take walks on the Corniche at sunset
As the pink and orange and purple light
Grace the ocean and the other city-dwellers who have come.

One night is marked as we walk past the boardwalk and before I understand
what’s going on,
we are in front of a roadblock in front of an armed man
in front of the hotel where Hariri died months ago now,
a building right up on the beach, a building with the front sliced off
so we can see all the rooms inside,
like a doll house,
except the floors are bent through ceilings and frozen dripping.
There are metal rods stuck skyward, and a group of seagulls
pecking at something on the seventh floor.

(Not Lebanon, July 2006)

We watch war on television,
Arabic channels beamed by satellite to California.

We call Lebanon,
we wait for news of which villages have been hit,
who is staying, who is leaving;
some are even going
back home.

We wonder how it will end
and how far Nasrallah will go.

Many support him,
don’t want to say it,
since the man wears a dress and a big beard
and gets money from Iran,
but he is strong in a way that we admire.

We talk about the big wars from last century
and the time of peace between then and now.

And on my lunch-break downtown,
in front of the building that I never realized houses the Israeli consulate.
On one side of the street, they wave Israeli and American flags
and on one side Palestinian and Lebanese flags.

Voices fly back and forth…chants, drumbeats.

Two men in suits walk by and
one asks the other
what this is about. Neither knows
and they ask a policeman, who explains…

Walking on, the first man asks, nodding his head
towards the Arab side: “What do they want from us,
Anyway?” The other shakes his head.

A ragged man on the corner shouts:

“Who belongs to a war?
Who does a war belong to?”