Читать книгу The News - Jeffrey Brown - Страница 13

Beirut

“This is the family tradition: my father

killed by his bodyguards, his father

killed. They chose sides, chose right

and then wrong and he who longs for

the security of death in his bed must

leave this country. My son knows this

and his will too.” Within the same frame

the eye deceives, meanings hide when

you stand outside this history. What

I’d thought was construction, a building

with views toward the sea, on the rise,

was its opposite, destruction: pockmarked,

see-through, gun-wrecked Holiday Inn,

monument against forgetting. Restaurants

filled, kebabs on the grill, and on this day

jets in Gaza, far to the south. In the south

of this city, craters from other jets

left, again, unfilled, while a billboard

touts the Party of God. Permission

required to aim the camera, granted by

Hezbollah—watching us watching them

watching them watching us, and all know

who controls these streets. Later I walk the

Corniche, in this Paris of the Middle East—

was it ever so? Two decades of war—

from Little Mountain: “We were looking

for the sea.” Look again, so close, here!

And there, can it be? The familiar choice

of chocolate or glazed, no wrong or right.

Hezbollah by day, Dunkin’ Donuts at night.

Auden saw it in Brueghel’s Icarus:

within the same frame, tragedy plus

a girl eating ice cream, strawberry.

This is what we encounter, too: memories

that encompass craters and bombed hotels,

faces red with hate at the jets overhead.

But also the sound of the oud, the light

in the park, nervous fathers watching for falls.