On Closing Guantanamo Prison

I reprint a poem I wrote in 2007 about Guantanamo. It was based on a garden I tended among the construction rubble of my new housing development. I dug water courses to irrigate my wild plants. Upon one, there was a colony of small creatures, looking like aphids, of a orange-red color huddled on the apex of the plant. To me, they looked for all the world like the prisoners I had seen in photos from Guantanamo - or Gitmo - prison in Cuba. They were there for most of the year; they huddled in the sun, in the rain, and maintained their perilous perch even in the strong winds that bent their domestic stalk close to the ground. Then - maybe late August, there were ladybugs there. Now maybe they became ladybugs, or maybe the ladybugs ate them. But..not knowing what else to do, I prayed. The name of the poem is Father Ghraib = Abu Ghraib, the literal meaning, and Mother Gitmo. I suppose I was thinking of Bertolt Brecht and Mother Courage, and maybe I thought of Kurt Weil, also. The ending is on a note of fatal fascination, for now as we will release the prisoners held for years, we justly fear they will hate us. Of course, many will. That is the price we must pay for what we have done. So we shall wait and see. (note: I somewhere refer to them as "juvenile aphids". I was not aware at the time that the US government admitted to holding at least 12 juveniles at Guantanamo: http://current.com/items/89536309/u_s_admits_it_held_12_juveniles_at_guantanamo.htm )

Father Ghraib and Mother Gitmo Behind the garage there is a garden, in the wastelands. The builders stole the soil; they sold it to pay the landscapers crew! Water channels dug into sand and stone, through broken concrete and asphalt, recycled crap from everywhere. Experiment to see what will grow… builders just throw trees into holes, toss flowers into trenches… no mindfulness, no husbandry no botany, no lasting beauty… trees…symbols on an architect’s sketch: seen from above pointillistic circles with bent branches twisting around a circle like swastikas deformed. But something grows in this waste land! A tree surrogate with leaves like elephant ears of a wide florescent green on a stem thinly veined in burgundy kermes; a desert spike with compounded eyes of saffron lids bepetalled; walking sticks with purple crowns, mille foil clouds, creeping parasols, great pendant hearts, explosions of the briar, Hemlocks where we hang our hearts; covert agents of desire, spies of reproduction, texting with chromo-semaphores. The fairies pippin, Mab’s nonpareil, spanish pearmain, grizzly muscadine, early Margaret and scarlet crofton; all fruits of rich imagination! In the midst of this, on the verge of a small isle in the streams, stands a vulgar hyssop unseen among the vibrant pageantry. United around its upper course juvenile aphids clutch and huddle in prison suits of blood-orange: silently there and nowhere else… and wait for the time of their fulfillment. A denumerable crowd sits as if in dreaming prayer, bidden to the masjid of stinging nettle and menthol, alone and stripped of their imam whose sermon they cannot ken. I watch in fatal fascination this epithalamion symbiotic, not knowing if we rise as ladybirds to dry our wings… or swarm to our demise.