It was a day when you blew the horn and everything was forgiven.
It was a day when the slaves were liberated
but the women were never liberated because the men had fallen prey
to the notion of devotion, to all the delusions of their God
who watched over them like a father, a moral accountant, a stern executive.
It was a day when you blew a ram’s horn into the face of God
and God shivered because he had not expected so much noise and dust
in the world he created—God of herders, God of nomads, God of men
who lurch into sandstorms without a sense of direction,
and the sandstorm was the War on Terror, and the terror was the war,
and the warriors wandered lost in their delusions of glory and grandeur,
and the inhabitants corrected them with a variety of sharp objects that tore.
So the sides kept fighting, and the sides kept winning and losing, and the flags flew
and the laggards were trampled underfoot, djinns were crippled, heroes
blindly massacred each other over a handful of sand in Gaza,
a mouthful of water in the Dead Sea, a thimble of oil in the Mideast.
Paul Dresman
