The Coward’s Curse

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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The U.S. military is calling on all Iraqi leaders, Sunni and Shiite, to condemn the recent kidnapping and killing of 15 Iraqi police officers in retaliation for the alleged rape of a Sunni woman. CNN News  Australia is a member of the Coalition of the Willing. Here then is death.  Here is the end of dreams and hope and memory.  Fifteen mothers’ sons, born of love’s embraces and obliterated in a single moment of hate. The men were taken at night, tied and blindfolded, and in the morning they were forced to kneel in a field between date palms.  They smelt for the last time the ancient earth and the new morning.  They listened to the litany of sins for which they must pay – not because they committed them but because they represented them. Here is the hand that holds the gun that sends a bullet into the head of my brother.  Here is evil incarnate and dressed in the garb of righteousness.  Here is oblivion delivered for God. And my blood rises like a hot tide to drown all the evil of this world, to kill the man who kills the man, to rip away the criminal from his mask. And I, now hating, dare to judge and toss my coward’s curse at the feet of a coward.  And who am I, cloistered in my green street growing roses and sending soldiers off to fight the enemies of my friend?  Am I less a brute? Just because I do not pull the trigger or wipe the spattered brain from my shoes?   Just because I do not look on the result of what I do? Just because I kill with missiles? From a distance?  

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