By Saba Maher
To all Dispatchers
Before I offer you my reaction to the midnight raid and slaughter of my brothers and sisters in Afghanistan by a reported all too drunk and “overstressed” soldier,
I ask you
What is good enough for a massacred people?
THEY SAY, let us use pilgrimages to Hajj as a front for reparations
To All Dispatchers, what is good enough for you, your family, or my people?
AFGHAN GOOD ENOUGH
When the OCCUPYING Forces Do Not EVEN KNOW our Afghan NAMES?!
And Name for us the ONE entitled to decree what is Good Enough for an Afghan other than the Afghan
Mr. and Mrs. Dispatcher
Excuse me for my lack of sympathy
But an apology just won’t do
Because….
My fingertips trace rusted circles around nothing endlessly
And I wonder where these traces will take me
Where will it take me?
I wonder if this is the way it’s supposed to be
To trace nothing
but blood
While wishing away hopelessly
Tell me.
You wanna understand?
Wanna understand?
How a thousand times over isn’t enough?
30 more years of ripping skin
Decades of choked pain that drains the color from the flesh that torments the mind and eats through the nerves
Do you wanna understand?
How it feels when your mother is raped with bullets and your fathers every cell locked in steel
Do you?
How every dream for peace and return is slapped with the reality of a branded burn
How every morning prayer is split into seventy-seven consecutive funerals in Meymaneh
But not before every corpse is dragged on the back of a pick up truck to the governor of Kandahar
Because bunker buster bombs beheaded the yeteem in Nangahar
Because the drill of rocket attacks launched from Bagram left a permanent drum
In Ariana’s bleeding ear…and she can’t fall asleep at night
Without the lull of a Tomcats drone
She can’t make it in the day if her cries aren’t met with roadside roar
You wanna know?
Huh? Do you?
That even the wind has a color in Afghanistan
The color of soot-covered rose
The color of soot-covered rose
Because the earth has no stomach to house casualties of war
“We are not ghosts. Our flesh will return to the earth to remind you of our mortality.”
She will spit back every martyred man, woman, and baby
To JOIN us in an undying army commanded
To SING
LIVE
RESIST
DANCE
CHANT
BREATH
ATTAN
EXIST
AND
Love YOU
YES We Will LOVE You
EVEN When 1,600-pound bombs are deployed to break our backs
We Will Love You
Even when you insult us by desecrating our dead
We will LOVE
MY Tax dollar funded
Green, Blue, Brown, Hazel Foreign Eyed OCCUPPYING,
Khakhi Camo INVADING, Extraterritorial, out your element Gung Ho war mongering
Afghan Blood on Your Hands
Bible Muttering
US/NATO led
and Lost soldier
We will Love you
Because LOVE, NOT HATRED, IS THE I-REPRESSIBLE SPRING Which OUTLASTS OCCUPATION
You wanna understand?
Go ahead. Raid villages and execute unborn children
Smash skulls and drifting doves
The wind rippled in blood
I smell the putrid stench of NATO’s calculated worth
When a mother screams to her death before giving birth
Calculate the worth, while her husband convulsively moans as she bleeds
Drones drowning dreams
You wanna understand?
Huh? Do you,
Mister and Mrs. Dispatcher?
“We Are….
Living
Breathing
Dead bodies.”
No War Machine’s pre-calculated executions will carpet bomb us into submission
The US and NATO War of Liberation is no more liberated than our dead
Is No More Liberated
than our Last Breath
(Breath)
Saba Maher read this poem at a rally against the NATO Summit in Chicago. She represents Afghans For Peace.
Photo Credit: Jesse David
