Frederick Foote Poetry

        You Made the Iraqis Their Scarves

                                                (for Doctor Pat McKay)

When limbs are lost

who stops to think

of clothing thrown away

Who knows the shame

of sheltered girls

on sudden public display?

And so within

the non-combatants’ ward

they neither prayed

nor shrank from pork

but showed their skin

with vacant-eyed sang-froid      

knowing that since

the world had burned alive

it didn’t matter.

You came out of the O.R.

night after night

and wrote your orders

just as the men would do

but then, instead

of clumping off to bed

or getting drunk

on bootleg DVD’s

You’d find a place

no one could observe

bring out an ancient

Singer sewing machine

and squares of silk

left over from a quilt

the nurses made

to celebrate our work

And there each night

like the breath of a word

You’d sew, quietly sew

as the ocean weaves a reef

together after a storm        

binding polyps

and tiny fish

bringing grass

back together with stone

with overflowing

largesse of patience

because the vast      

inhuman cost of life        

exists to make things whole.                        

The day you brought the scarves down

they pressed your hands

and those not maimed

tied scarves around the heads

of friends who couldn’t move

(silk to die for                        

new to those

dust-colored homes

only the F-18s

had deemed worth bombing)

Those who thought

they could no longer weep             

wept to feel the touch

of simple cloth

And they were once again sacred women.

          Dark Center

                         (for Cassandra Spears, R.N.)

Twice a day it welled up, on the Iraqi mens’ ward--

the cries of “alam”—meaning pain—would rise and waver again,

in a ululating howl, dead wolves crying for the moon,

from the depths of the Baathist beast, the teens, the old men in cabs

riddled with bullets as Baghdad seethed.

Today it began again, and we waited in dread,

knowing no one could ever hope to heal this

on our spaceship of abduction rocketing through the void—

till you, Cassandra Spears, with your Grady-born* grace,

deep and wide as Atlanta with its fear-drenched poor,

yelled,  “Shut up! I alam!” and as the hubbub eased,

“Ya’ll make me have alam!”—and they laughed through their tears.

                                                         (* Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta)

          The Man in the Wound

Quiet the ward, quiet the dressing-cart now,

quiet the morphine drip, blessed easer of pain—

turning his head as I pass, he says, “Hi, Doc”,

asks if I’m working too hard—I look beat—overstrained.

His wound came at Nasirayah, and I was not there

to shield him from bullets and flame, being safe in the rear;

yet his thought is always of me, the nurse or the friend,

sometimes even the enemy soldier he glimpses or hears.

With arms laid waste, he finds no reason to hate;

his comrades now are all who grieved and withstood:

just as the wound proclaims the hell all have made,

the man in the wound is raised—shown peaceful, and good.

          The Iraqi Ward

                                   (for Mounira)

A village always suffers

this one had gowns

old men tea drinkers

there were prayers

and dominoes

and cards though only

half the players had hands

All those were games

you watched but wouldn’t play

you were the mother

smiling mound

in a black burgah

You left your face unveiled

who would hide

such beaming eyes

such rounded cheeks away                

Your children dead

within the riddled car

and yet you never cried

when we made scarves

you tied one on

the girl who couldn’t move

you led the prayers

certified the food

and never once broke down

Until the day

the place was disassembled

the healed taken

out to crouching Frogs

for transport home

that was the day you chose

to fall into the arms

of Senior-Chief Minata

the one so good with the kids

a man not your husband

to sway weeping                                                                                

clasped together                                                                             

a strange beast                                                                                 

half uniformed half black 
 
crying,“Salaam, Salaam!"                                                                                                                      

          Bonded                      

Loader and gunner, brothers from boot camp days,

they came in one platoon to the shock of the war;    

daily they huddled together for strength and grace;

each promised to bring the other home once more.

Now both return: two versions of amputee.

It’s back to Lejeune, driving the truck with one hand,

learning the truth about girls—will they nurture and cleave,

or turn with regret to find an unblemished man?

The road treks hard through rehab, shrinks, the V.A.,

edged nights that dream of friends who couldn’t be saved;

the hale will dance and run; few will know what to say,

and pity’s worse than contempt to the souls of the brave.

          Nursing the Iraqis

Here’s how I learned their tongue: “Sadeek! Sagheer

ousissiya (small operation)”—he goggled at me—

“La alam! La alam! (No pain)”  took the edge off the fear—    

we had no translators-- infallible DoD.

That came from a Berlitz book, a nightly task,

after the wounds, the unrelenting burns had had their run...                

We must have seemed to be mad. Doctors chanting on rounds,

nurses warbling, corpsmen speaking tongues,

never since Babel such an overflow of sounds.           

One phrase—“Salaam Alaykum”— stilled every alarm:

It showed in the face, the terror yanked like a mask--

No one who knew God’s name could mean them harm.

          The Hurt Fedayeen

We shot him twice, and now we’re saving his life;

it  seems absurd, but that’s what Americans do—    

blow a place apart, then put it together again,

pretending it’s good as new.

We won’t recall his face, he’s just a pin in the map

on which, day after day, the war’s reborn--

there’s always a clean glass eye, a limb neat from the pack,

a fresh martyr to mourn,

while past the sandbagged door, out on the camera set

where TV parcels out the network news,

the maimed world lurches by, calling for bread,

unwilling to die of wounds.

          The Gunner, John

Pity him here, his skull crushed by a tread—

beneath the mud pressed out, one intact jaw,

some teeth at ninety degrees, the scraps of a tongue—

Was he no more than this?  No, this was a mask;

place it in calm beneath the ground,

and when he takes it off he’ll still be whole.