Ram in the Thicket Original Poetry – Jim McGarrah The Good Soldier I - Isaac The sand swirls around the hem of his robe, tents billowing in the distance like canvas sails as he and Abraham trudge away from camp toward Mt. Moriah. The sun casts his father’s long shadow over the earth and shades the desert cactus in blackness. The boy smells their vanilla blooms, feels their roots against his sandal soles and wonders why his father carts the wood for Yahweh’s altar so far from home, so close to desolation. He asks as they climb into the clouds, slipping on the damp rocks, with the cries of carrion birds and jackals in their ears, why no sacrificial lamb trails behind. His father says they have a deal with God and Isaac knows the heir’s duty is obeisance. He never questions why his father’s God might need his youthful blood, or how much land its shedding might buy for a people not yet born, but stacks the kindling on the flat plateau as Abraham glides his blade along a whetstone and says, “This will hurt me more than it hurts you.” His father’s hollow words will ring for generations of sons and Isaac wants to cry, “How is that possible?” Instead, he lets his father bind his hands and lay him on the metal grate so blood will drip and fuel the fire below. Abraham puts his palm against the sweating forehead, coaxes the throat to expose itself as if it were a white rose, the bloom most beautiful right before it dies. Isaac sees the knife slice through the thin mountain air, the sun reflects his face off the metal, the taste of copper fills his mouth when he bites his lip. His heart thumps behind his eardrums so loud the clouds tremble and gnash their teeth against a graying sky. What does death smell like - brackish water in the salt sea, his mother Sarah’s milkless breast, and brother Ishmael’s tainted flesh, all soaked into the cuff of his father’s wool robe as it drapes Ram in the Thicket Original Poetry – Jim McGarrah across his eyes to blind the final stroke. What does death sound like? The harsh bleat of an innocent ram caught in a thicket. II - Abraham The sand swirls around the hem of his robe, his tents billowing in the distance like canvas sails as he and Isaac march toward Mt. Moriah. The sun warms his olive cheeks as the knowledge of his promised kingdom warms his pockets. Father and son climb the stone path. The wind is Yahweh’s voice and it drives them both like sheep toward the summit, a wind more word than air, a spirit unseen that powers the father to think unspeakable thoughts he could not bear unless his faith in God allowed him. Through your seed, the nations of the earth shall be blessed, through Isaac your descendants shall be named. The voice echoes in his mind, but he never questions how his son’s slaughter serves this purpose, his wife a hundred years old, barren, and he so close to death the smell of rotted earth and lilacs wake him every night. Abraham only knows that to lead a great nation a father must be willing to sacrifice a son. He watches Isaac stack the wood, then binds the boy’s hands and lays him on the altar. Sweat breaks along his brow as he guides his blade across the whetstone. The sharp metal shines in the sunlight and he wheezes in the thin air. His mind begins to braid its dreams like rope, many strands into one strand, gathering strength with each twist – Samson wrecks the Philistines, David slays Goliath, the walls of Jericho tumble. Mohammed screams jihad. King Richard marches eastward with children for Christ. Heretics and flames, the smell of burned flesh washes over Abraham. Gas and gunpowder, tanks and planes, missiles and mushroom clouds, all spurting from the severed artery in the son’s neck – until the father sees that one son is never enough for any god, until he hears the harsh bleat of an innocent ram caught in an eternal thicket. Ram in the Thicket Original Poetry – Jim McGarrah Inheritance (a tourist’s note to himself from the Balkans) In the Adriatic pebbled by a spring breeze, a castle twice the age of your homeland rises from the water and, as the morning sun’s light echoes off the stones, you can see into the past. The Hapsburg’s drink, cry, laugh, and rule their way into oblivion while your ancestors immigrate to a raw wilderness called The New World. Your blood was born in this soil. The skin is pearl with a flush of red as you rage silently when you imagine Europe exploding a few miles from your seat on this park bench. History swirls around you like the constant flow of refugees from Kosovo and the vapor trails of NATO jets across the snow-capped Alps. A woman pushes a baby carriage into a Kava bar and walks away to buy the morning paper. You wonder if she’s Serbian, Croatian, Muslim, or Christian and if the carriage is wired with C-4. Even in this beauty, this smell of salt air and diesel fuel, this taste of squid Trieste and Lasko beer, this roar of motor bikes, the carnival atmosphere of gaudy fishing boats and old men mending nets, this laughter of small children tied to their parents wrists and bouncing like helium balloons along the crowded sidewalk - yes, even in this beauty you can’t stop yourself from thinking, the only metaphor for life might be extinction. You wait for the blast from the baby carriage that will lift the Kava bar and its customers from the earth, separating flesh from spirit by the sheer force of simple physics instead of rape camps and hidden borders scratched into stones by Roman armies two thousand years before. It never happens. The woman returns with her newspaper and lifts the baby into her arms as you, in your own brief history of napalm and Cruise missiles, might lift a shattered dream. Ram in the Thicket Original Poetry – Jim McGarrah National Guard (for Aubrey) Last month, a student withdrew from class engaged by her own signature in America’s newest war. Today, her letter tells me she’s forty-five miles from Baghdad and crying at the starving faces of Iraqi children, that all she’s fighting are mosquitoes, and even though it’s really hot, she’s freezing. That’s the way war is, a conflict between hot and cold in places where even bugs want your blood. I don’t remember women in Vietnam except in pieces, like a Goya painting, heads separated from arms and legs separated from torsos by a blue background of explosions brushed over a canvas stitched from banyans, bamboo and B-52’s. I’ve been enlightened since then. Now women have the right to kill as well as die. If, with the slight flutter of adrenalin in her stomach and the roar of cordite in her blood my student learns the power of slaughter, then she’ll equal any man. At least that’s what the generals say – Come join our band of merry warriors and save the world by wrecking it. I want to believe that being free means more than being American. I want to believe there are many gods, like flowers, with no desires only bright colors and the fragrance of a laughing child. I want to believe my student will return to me with all her self synchronized and ticking smoothly, instead of like a broken watch. Ram in the Thicket Original Poetry – Jim McGarrah Ben Thans Marketplace – Saigon, 2005 In the middle of morning glories and raw fish, an old soldier with one plastic arm and air where another should be offers me a package of postcards. If I buy them, he says he can help feed his children today and I can show my friends I’m visiting Vietnam. I tell him I was here in ’68 before the truce, when he and I were young men, when the grass grew high, watered with our blood, when his cracked teeth and my mind were whole, when we thought there would always be enough rain for rice and wars served a greater good, before we learned droughts come and go without warning. He lays the postcards in my palm. The metal clip clicks like a real knuckle, warm with flesh, snaps and pops to release its load. But steel is cold and the curtain of pain drawn across his black eyes tells me nothing of what this man feels about losing the chance to ever caress his wife. Ram in the Thicket Original Poetry – Jim McGarrah Peace A small green fruit grows only from the earth in Hue. Seeded by the Trai Va tree, it rises round and moist in soil blood-red with memories. I share it now with my friend Vo Que at the Garden Café just off a dirt trail in this city where my heart stopped singing so many years ago, silenced in a battle to claim what was never mine. Que and I are two poets grown old by sharing one dream from different worlds. Here, in this jungle heat beneath lavender blossoms and banyan trees that once shaded tanks, rifles, mines, and death, we speak of hope. A voice within us both chants in counterpoint harmony beyond our separate tongues.