Eyes Wide Open
-by Sam Hamill, first published by Rattle magazine
The
little olive-skinned girl
peered up at me
from
the photograph
with
her eyes wide open,
deep
brown beautiful eyes
that bore silent witness
to a
grief as old as the ages.
She
was young,
and very beautiful, as only
the
young can be,
but within such beauty
as
bears calamity silently:
because
it has run out of tears.
I
closed the magazine and went
outside to the wood pile
and
split a couple of logs, thinking,
‘Her fire is likely
an
open fire tonight,
bright flames licking
and
waving
like
rising pennants in the breeze.’
When
I was a boy,
I heard about the bloodshed
in Korea,
about the Red Army
perched at our threshold,
and the bombs
that
would annihilate our world
forever.
I
got under my desk with the rest of the foolish world.
In Okinawa, I wore the uniform
and carried the weapon
until
my eyes began to open,
until I choked
on
Marine Corps pride,
until I came to realize
just
how willfully I had been blind.
How
much grief is a life?
And what can be done unless
we
stand among the missing, among the murdered,
the orphaned,
our
own armed children, and bear witness
with
our eyes wide open?
When
I was a child, frightened of the night
and crying in my bed,
my
father told me a poem or sang,
‘Empty
saddles in the o-l-d corral,
where
do they r-i-d-e tonight.’
Homer
thought the dead arrived
into a field of asphodels.
‘Musashino,’
near Tokyo,
means
‘Musashi’s Plain,’
the
warrior’s way washed in blood.
The
war-songs are sung
to the same old marching measures(
oh,
how we love to honor the dead.
A
world without war? Who but a child or a fool
could
imagine such a thing?
Corporate
leaders go to school
on Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
‘We
all deplore it,’ the President says,
issuing bombing orders,
‘but
God is on our side.’
Which
blood is Christian,
which
Muslim, Jew or Hindu?
The
beautiful girl with the beautiful sad eyes
watches, but
has
not spoken. What can she
possibly
say?
She carries the burden of finding
another
way.
In
her eyes, the ruins, the fear,
the
shoes that can’t be filled, hands
that
will never stroke her hair.
But
listen. And you will hear her small, soft, plaintive voice
(it’s
already there within you(
a
heartbeat, a whisper,
a
promise broken(
if
only you listen
with
your eyes wide open.