DIGNITY OF SLEEP
C. MANNONE
BY JOHN
The teakettle steamed.
A blue bowl teetered on the edge
of the table, half-full of lentils and rice.
He stared at it for most the night,
watched it congeal, his eyes still glued
on the cold black-and-white paste
when they came for him. He took
his last sip of hot water with honey.
Straggly hair curtained his hard brown
eyes; morning sun piercing the glint in them.
In and out of shadows, his face washed
with shades of blankness. And his mouth,
once again too dry to spit at the man
chanting prayers. His long shuffle
to the scaffold, no longer prolonged
by emptiness of night—the sun always
climbs faster in the dawn—as fast as
a black hood would settle over his head,
a new kind of darkness falling.
What did he yell into its silence?
Indignant epithets, the muffled
Shahada mumbling through draped
sackcloth? No ashes at his feet.
But he must have heard the deafening
cries in that darkness sift through
dirt, through graves of thousands,
to threads hanging next to his ears:
all the ghosts of gallows, plaintive wails
of spirits of the dead, Kurds massacred
—Barzani, Sardasht, Anfal—
for a moment, resurrected
to jeer at the indignity of their long wait.
Gyroscope Review 16-4
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