Читать книгу The Collector of Bodies - Diane Glancy - Страница 7

1.

Once I was in a van in Syria.

The roads were like riding a camel.

There was desert cluttered with pebbles that seemed rubble,

but was standard for the houses in villages

made of stone and mortar

and next door the olive orchards and women picking there.

Or doing the work in fields where the country

was broken into with mountains and of course

the Mediterranean Sea.

By day, I traveled place to place,

making steady passage into the distance.

I took notes on the passing land—

a bump in the road, and the words I wrote

could not be read.

Or I made run-on statements of what I saw.

There is brightness of sunlight there is remoteness—

until I looked for meaning in my notes and found none

though I looked under the mountains and in the sea.

At night, the open windows. The dark sea by Jableh.

The waves of Arabic language rich with a new horizon.

I saw the eyes of people floating with curiosity

and mine at them as well.

2.

Every time I left a town I took the view of a boat

leaving the sea vacant there on the shore

as if the whole world were a broken slice of the moon

across the Mediterranean.

I tell you these valleys will run with blood

if these wars of nations continue—

these open, running sores

in the general way the world is moving

as if draining to a close

the way I shut my purse with a click

in the Damascus marketplace, the suk,

the burro with his dosser, the stalls of meat,

the home-spun silver pin I bought.

3.

Yet the road rippled as though a field

where an ancient farmer plowed his furrows,

and from my viewpoint,

when I saw more soldiers with their guns,

I knew no one in my country could tell me what

to believe

and I was happy about it.

Those beliefs have to come from within

or I would be at odds

as I was the day I went to the Muslim school for girls

and my heart sat a little at their desks, and the door

for me was in the leaving which they could not,

and among them were the people I met and spoke at.

They were kind you see and allowed me to talk

as the sun scrubbed the lovely sea at their port city

on the coast at Lattakia.

Wherever I went

the loudspeaker from a minaret read from the Koran

of the Islam religion into the streets.

What if they piped the Bible into my own country

on the corner of Market and Elm?

As I passed through Aleppo and Homs

on my way back to Damascus

I thought of the bylaws of my own country—

the triune system of Capitalism for greed,

Democracy for altruism,

the Judeo-Christian heritage for a moral component.

And the Syrian road where the apostle Paul was

dumbstruck1 two thousand years ago

was brought right up front at last.

Something far away and remote

weighted its place in my bones.

Discontinuities or something like that

because of the conflicts and contradictions

in the human heart.

1. Acts 9:3-4