Losses

General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops

in Iraq was close to 3,800, said ‘The truth is you never do get

used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes,

and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’—

leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story

involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol,

tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball,

but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking,

all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be

reciting poetry. ‘My life’, said the interpreter, ‘is like a bag of flour

thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‘No, no’, he said,

correcting himself. ‘Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’

Source: Coming In To Land: Selected Poems 1975—2015 (HarperColins Publishers Inc., 2017)