Saturday Haiku: Collapse

 

sometimes the earth shakes
disagreements forgotten
in the search for life 

___________________

Photo from The Wall Street Journal via Mint: "Civilians look for survivors under the rubble of collapsed buildings in Kahramanmaras, close to the quake's epicentre, the day after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck the country's southeast, on February 7, 2023." (Photo: AFP)

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Aleppo After the Fall

There has been so much beauty and so much history in Syria. There are many beautiful and noble people, just as there are in any country. Unfortunately, the people have suffered too long under the wartime destruction brought on by continued conflict in the region. Think of the children growing up who know nothing but the desolation of war. Last week we witnessed yet another chapter in that tragedy as the U.S. moved out and Turkey moved in to begin the removal of the Kurds from their Syrian border.

The following poem is a lament that I first posted in June of 2017. I am re-posting it here in honor of those whose hardships and sufferings I can only helplessly grieve. We see once again that "victory is as dangerous as defeat."

Ruins near the citadel in Aleppo’s Old City. Credit Sebastián Liste/Noor Images, for The New York Times

"Aleppo After the Fall: As the Syrian civil war turns in favor of the regime, a nation
adjusts to a new reality – and a complicated new picture of the conflict emerges"

(title of article in The New York Times Magazine)

Aleppo After the Fall

In a city so ancient

That a merchant can stand on a street corner

Where his blood ancestor may have stood

Three thousand years before,
There comes a haphazard reprieve from war.

A weary silence falls
Where streets once bustled

With sales of fabric and spice

Amid the sweet cacophony

Of exuberant traders and pilgrims.

Like a shattered plate,

The courtyard of The Great Mosque

Now lies in fragments –

The hundreds of daily footsteps

But a prayerful memory.

Children play –

When they dare come out –

In the rubble-strewn side streets

While old men try to remember

The ancient pathways.

A flute still plays in the distance;

A dancer regains her steps.

The rest of us settle

Into a strange new world

Where victory is as dangerous as defeat.

                                                                      ~ CK

“On March 7, 2006, the sun rises on Aleppo. Aleppo, along with Damascus and Sana'a, is one of the three oldest inhabited cities in human history,  added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1986.” (From The Atlantic Monthly, “Aleppo Before the War"  - Photo by Khaled Al Hariri / Reuters)

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Peace in a Time of War

"Aleppo after the Fall" speaks to that uneasy peace, that "haphazard reprieve from war," and the attempt to find a normal life in a world that seems to be perpetually at war.

[Originally posted on June 4, 2017 as part of the "Bearing Witness to the Times" series]

Ruins near the citadel in Aleppo’s Old City. Credit Sebastián Liste/Noor Images, for The New York Times

Aleppo After the Fall

In a city so ancient

That a merchant can stand on a street corner

Where his blood ancestor may have stood

Three thousand years before,
There comes a haphazard reprieve from war.

A weary silence falls
Where streets once bustled

With sales of fabric and spice

Amid the sweet cacophony

Of exuberant traders and pilgrims.

Like a shattered plate,

The courtyard of The Great Mosque

Now lies in fragments –

The hundreds of daily footsteps

But a prayerful memory.

Children play –

When they dare come out –

In the rubble-strewn side streets

While old men try to remember

The ancient pathways.

A flute still plays in the distance;

A dancer regains her steps.

The rest of us settle

Into a strange new world

Where victory is as dangerous as defeat.

                                                                      ~ CK

“On March 7, 2006, the sun rises on Aleppo. Aleppo, along with Damascus and Sana'a, is one of the three oldest inhabited cities in human history,  added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1986.” (From The Atlantic Monthly, “Aleppo Before the War"  - Photo by Khaled Al Hariri / Reuters)

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Bearing Witness to the Times: A Unity of Bombs

Photo from Mass Communication SPC. Ford Williams/U.S. Navy via AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Tomahawk missiles streak through the air as Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Porter conducts strike operations against Syria while in the Mediterranean Sea on April 7, 2017 (New York Daily News)

"World leaders praise US attack on Syria, while Assad allies fume"

(Headline from The Hill)

A Unity of Bombs

How quickly sentiments can change

With a bomb –

Like a collective sigh of relief.

A shower of missiles launched

Toward a Syrian airbase

Suddenly changed the public narrative.

Opponents applaud a decisive act.

Critics allow

That something had to be done.

It’s like those Hollywood westerns

When the sheriff fires a gun into the air

And the crowd settles down.

When peace and diplomacy

Become tiresome,

A good bomb can break the tension –

Reset the clock.

An empire

With excess guns and bombs

Has one solution for every problem.

While heads of state

Gloat

Posture

Challenge

Or congratulate,

The people remain crushed

Under the heel

Of political power.

A bomb makes a leader

Look decisive,

But the dust always settles

On the people now seen as collateral damage –

Disregarded and marginalized –

The dust settles,

Streamed by humanity’s tears.

                                                            ~ CK

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