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Carthago delendum est

Arthur Attwell

In Carthage, soldiers battered down our door,
unshaven Romans chapped with salt,
two days on the northern sea to find us
gone, though hiding in the roof's loose tiles.

Baghdad, the young Americans in tanks
like a film's horizon. Real, though, as the blast
that shattered our house around us.
How does it help that we lived? For after dark,

at last, the Roman soldiers found us there
and tore the cloth from my body.
That's when they took him from me, with his mouth
as wide as a cry that couldn't break from him, stuck

without electric power, the night wind blew
thick with sand off the battle fields,
grains rich with depleted uranium
left to burn inside my child's soft lungs,

in his choking throat, the terror and the silence.
At last they left. I lay there on the roof
and watched their army finish everything:
emptying bags of salt across our crops,

poison in our own home's ground. My son
survived six months with his leukaemia,
lived a half-life out in front of me.
In Carthage once, the Roman army marched

sowing salt, their casting arms as tireless
as a mother watching, dread's hope burning holes
in her falling chest till her child is gone from sight,
and the wheat dies with her for a thousand years.

LitNet: 20 September 2005

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