DREAM VESSELS # 4: Witnesses
from a Gulf War collage by Marsha Connell
The
women soldiers will go first.
—Marsha Connell, dream fragment
The
skies over Bagdhad have been illuminated.
—Bernard Shaw, CNN
She is a woman veiled. Roses dangle from stalks of
lightning
against a blood-red sky, a tree of strange knowledge.
In a dream she was asked to witness war games.
Sometimes life is like that—the artist observing
simultaneous layers of time. Mediators in occupied
territories:
A child in a pink dress watches reflections in the
water.
A woman shakes darkness from the folds of her robe.
Laser-guided missiles on the banks of the Tigris.
Confluence.
The idea of a key, a kite, and a storm unleashed
itself
from the sky to illumine the night. Tender filaments,
fragile blossoms of light burning from the coil.
But now, the ultimate burst which spawned the Age of
Light
yields roses of another kind. At Pearl Harbor
she saw Japanese men crying as they struggled to
understand,
because so much was hidden from them.
They learned for themselves what happened
from the things which did not survive.
The last of the Hibakusha, nearly all gone now.
She has more questions than answers, keeps looking
for hope, but finds only compelling darkness.
That child born during the Age of Light
holds onto a shadow woman of the desert,
the hijab hides her from prying eyes
of the 20th century, but cannot shield her from it.
The vase on a pedestal—a ballet dancer,
refined white gloves of ghosts,
the peculiar weight of roses.
Carrying dead grandmothers into marriage,
we were all young once, didn't notice the paradigm
between a love of nature, and dominion over the
weakest.
What of the child who will inherit the dowry of the
sky:
the seductive beauty of a mushrooming cloud,
incandescent roses,
the breathing of some unnamed fear in a dark room
where we can't find the switch in time.
Does she not see the lights of the city,
minute grains beneath her feet?
Spring 1991
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