Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 43

Residents identify a relative from among the bodies of those who were killed during Tuesday's bomb attack in Hilla, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, March 7, 2007. Insurgents killed 149 Shi'ite pilgrims heading for the holy Iraqi city of Kerbala on Tuesday, including 115 when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in one of the deadliest attacks of the 4-year-war.

REUTERS/Ali Jasim (IRAQ)

How Can It Be I Am No Longer I

by Lucie Brock-Broido

Winter was the ravaging in the scarified

Ghost garden, a freak of letters crossing down a rare

Path bleak with poplars. Only the yew were a crewel

Of kith at the fieldstone wall, annulled

As a dulcimer cinched in a green velvet sack.

To be damaged is to endanger--taut as the stark

Throats of castrati in their choir, lymphless & fawning

& pale. The miraculous conjoining

Where the beamless air harms our self & lung,

Our three-chambered heart & sternum,

Where two made a monstrous

Braid of other, ravishing.

To damage is an animal hunch

& urge, thou fallen--the marvelous much

Is the piece of Pleidaes the underworld calls

The nightsky from their mud & rime. Perennials

Ghost the ground & underground the coffled

Veins, an aneurism of the ice & spectacle.

I would not speak again. How flinching

The world will seem--in the lynch

Of light as I sail home in a winter steeled

For the deaths of the few loved left living I will

Always love. I was a flint

To bliss & barbarous, a bristling

Of tracks like a starfish carved on his inner arm,

A tindering of tissue, a reliquary, twinned.

A singe of salt-hay shrouds the orchard-skin,

That I would be--lukewarm, mammalian, even then,

In winter when moss sheathes every thing alive

& everything not or once alive.

That I would be--dryadic, gothic, fanatic against

The vanishing; I will not speak to you again.