Did you worry?
Did you die a little with me
  before we lived
Before the rescue
  Before God spoke to me?

You dropped down the same hole
You climbed the same wall
 You flew the same ride
You gave the same blood
You rescued me.

"Shul Shul"
We sang the lullaby and
The rock sang back
"Shul la rul"
While you huddled me
  beneath the blanket
My life threatening to ebb
  out in the stone and ice,
Hoping to outlast the
 tiny candles you set
To sustain the warmth of my own breath.

There, spring of my life,
  You saved your own root,
Where I lay broken after the fall,
  In that dark pit,
 A lonely end, but for you.

the sun a white ball
astride solid gray cloud;
rock without Sisyphus

On the Road to Baghdad

the rain coming down
spatters on the ground like
little explosions

Counter Threat Day 2.

• Starting the day off with a bang, before the second cup of coffee we watch four guys blown up on videos.  The keys to IEDs are the PIES it is explained to us, because everything in government needs an acronym and there is virtue in something memorable, and apparently if not also something ironic.  We learn that IEDs are classified by the type of switch.  An IED could be triggered by a doorbell; "Avon calling"  or  "Land Shark" . The most important thing to remember is that, counter to what we might expect in relationships, "distance is your friend".  Is that the kin of, "absence makes the heart grow fonder"?  Is it some secret reason some of us go to Iraq.  Apparently the explosive meth lab makers who shoot these explosives into their arms do not know that distance is their friend, or at least more true a friend.

Pinhole in gray sky
Onto a field of green grass
Lights one golden rod

Now is the Time, beloved

Here by the waters of the Babylon
I do not know you;
Shia, Sunni, Kurd,
Here where I give birth
To civilization,
To the plow, the tongue, the law,
The numbers and the poet,
Where now the tower
Has fallen and the tongues scattered,
Your noise only discord;
This sect, that sect
This rule, that right.
Beneath the din of explosions
I hear only the song of the beloved;
"Now is the time to know
That all you do is sacred, (not sected, bi or tri or multi)
Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God?"

Sun rises light red
On the road to Baghdad;
Red sky in morning

At counter-threat class
They seriously call the
First name; Mohammed

Early morning clouds
Half hide the sun sleepily
As the eye that sees

Baghdad pre-blog 2;  On the bus to Winchester, Va.  FACT Training

• How real is this?  Is this some game we play with the world at our feet, going to the wilds of Va. (just off 81) to simulate the land of Babylon as if the terrorism of ancient Mesopotamia is only a step away from the Federal Highway and the strip mall next to Holiday Inn?  Somewhere down the back roads of the idyllic rolling countryside where the rich tend their horses, we pretend the land where the bloody Assyrians to Tamerlane's hordes and then finally murderous Sadam ransacked, pillaged, tortured and left not stone on stone in the winds of the desert. 
• There is a surreal quality to the whole thing.  As we get on the bus to go to counter-threat training, the driver calls the names.  The first one on the list is, "Mohammed" he calls out loud, without a hint of jest.  Calmly and sharply Mohammed answers and the list goes on.
• Leaving our Hotel at the crack of dawn, the world has a quiet, numb quality.  I have broken some strange wondering dream to rise to the alarm and the sun is a dull white eye as we ride down the country road.  The sun is like the sleepy eye that views it, only half awake to its world.  And then as we turn the corner and peer directly to the East we can see its rise has tinted the sky a shallow red over the dull white gray, like a blood stain that would not rinse from a bed sheet but spread itself thin across the whole wash.  I am reminded suddenly and rudely of the old adage; "red sky in morning, ...take warning..."