A Poem from the translator of Rumi to the U.S. President
Just this Once
President Bush, before you order airstrikes,
imagine the first cruise missile
as a direct hit on your closest friend.
That might be Laura. Then twenty-five other
family and friends.
There are no survivors. Now imagine
some other way to do it. Quadruple
the inspectors, or put
a thousand and one U.N. people in.
Then call
for peace activists to volunteer to go to Iraq
for two weeks each. Flood
that country with well-meaning tourists, people
curious about the land that produced the great
saints, Gilani, Hallaj,
and Rabia. Set up hostels near those tombs.
Encourage peace people to spend a bunch of money
in shops, to bring rugs
home and samovars by the bushel. Send an Arabic
translator with every four peace activists.
The U.S. government will pay
for the translators and for building and staffing
the hostels, one hostel for every twenty activists
and five translators. The hostels
are state of the art, and they belong to the Iraqis
at the end of this experiment. Jimmy Carter, Nelson
Mandela, and my friend, Jonathan
Granoff at the U.N., will be the core organization
team. No one knows what might come of this. Maybe
nothing, or maybe it would
convince some Iraqis and some of the world that
we really do not wish to kill anybody, and that
we truly are not out
to appropriate oil reserves. We're working
on building a hydrogen vehicle as fast as we can,
aren't we? Put no limit
on the number of activists from all over
that might want to hang out and explore Iraq
for two weeks. Is anything
left of Babylon? There could be informal
courses for college credit and pickup soccer
games every evening at
five. Long leisurely suppers. The U.S.
government furnishes air transportation, that
is, hires airliners from
the country of origin and back for each peace
tourist, who must carry and spend the equivalent
of $1001 U.S. inside Iraq.
Keep part of the invasion force nearby as police,
but let those who claim to deeply detest war
try something else just this
once, for one year. Call our bluff. If this madman
Saddam's WMD threat is not, somehow, eliminated
by next February, you
can go in with special ops, and do it that way.
Medical services, transportation inside Iraq, lots
of big colorful buses - let
the pilgrims paint them! - along with many
other ideas that will be thought of later during
the course of this innocently,
blatantly, foolish project will all also be funded
by the U.S. government. There's a practice known
as sama, a deep listening
to poetry and music, with sometimes movement
involved. We could experiment with whole nights
of that, staying up until dawn,
sleeping in tents during the day. So instead
of war there's a peace period from March 2003
through February 2004.
It could be as though war had already happened,
as it has, and the healing and rebuilding. Now
we're in the celebration
afterward. I'll be the first to volunteer for two
weeks of wandering winter desert and reading Hallaj,
Abdul Qadir Gilani,
dear Rabia, and the life-saving 1001 Arabian Nights.
I am Coleman Barks, a retired English professor
living in Athens, Georgia,
and I don't really consider this proposal foolish.
Coleman Barks
2003
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