Saddam Hussein has been Captured

Posted on December 19, 2003 in Occupation of Iraq Poems

Note: I wrote the first draft of this on Sunday after I checked into IRC and saw the link to the BBC article. The pro-war crowd will probably insist that this celebrates the man because it pities him.

The day they caught him
it was clear. Like most
other Mesopotamian days.
The sun leaned on the desert.  Ditches
sluiced the water from the Tigris
to the fields of his ancestors.  A
subterranean wash sent it back again.
An Edenic serpent that had 
survived all its conquerors
bit its tail and took no notice
of the twitching body concealed
in the Place of the Corpse.

Inside his ventilated grave
he flicked his eyes, probing
strobic flashes of his last seraglio.
Under pink melon domes and
honeycombed muqarnas he strutted
past multifoil arches where he stationed
incorruptible guards,
Sunni muezzins who prayed for him,
and, in a singularly bulbous niche
a Koran written in his own blood.
When the men of the Fourth
exhumed him from the simpler dirt-topped vault
where he hid outside of the dream,
he looked nothing like the
nerve-gas-breathing monster
with the massive khaki chest
who terrorized a distant nation
by denying that he had what he didn’t have.

More like a Santa Claus,
a coal-blackened beard 
looking sad because 
he had no gifts to give
the beardless boys
who captured him or
the observant doctors
who proved before 
the  American press corps
that he had not yet been embalmed.

When I heard the news
it was raining.  Fat drops.
Widely spaced apart.
Hitting the pavement explosively.