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By Sam Hamill, first published by Rattle magazine

The little olive-skinned girl

peered up at me

from the photograph

with her eyes wide open,

deep brown beautiful eyes

that bore silent witness

to a grief as old as the ages.

She was young,

and very beautiful, as only

the young can be,

but within such beauty

as bears calamity silently:

because it has run out of tears.

I closed the magazine and went

outside to the wood pile

and split a couple of logs, thinking,

'Her fire is likely

an open fire tonight,

bright flames licking

and waving

like rising pennants in the breeze.'

When I was a boy,

I heard about the bloodshed

in Korea, about the Red Army

perched at our threshold,

and the bombs

that would annihilate our world

forever.

I got under my desk with the rest of the foolish world.

In Okinawa, I wore the uniform

and carried the weapon

until my eyes began to open,

until I choked

on Marine Corps pride,

until I came to realize

just how willfully I had been blind.

How much grief is a life?

And what can be done unless

we stand among the missing, among the murdered,

the orphaned,

our own armed children, and bear witness

with our eyes wide open?

When I was a child, frightened of the night

and crying in my bed,

my father told me a poem or sang,

'Empty saddles in the o-l-d corral,

where do they r-i-d-e tonight.'

Homer thought the dead arrived

into a field of asphodels.

'Musashino,' near Tokyo, means

'Musashi's Plain,'

the warrior's way washed in blood.

The war-songs are sung

to the same old marching measures(

oh, how we love to honor the dead.

A world without war? Who but a child or a fool

could imagine such a thing?

Corporate leaders go to school

on Sun Tzu's Art of War.

'We all deplore it,' the President says,

issuing bombing orders,

'but God is on our side.'

Which blood is Christian,

which Muslim, Jew or Hindu?

The beautiful girl with the beautiful sad eyes

watches, but

has not spoken. What can she

possibly say?

She carries the burden of finding

another way.

In her eyes, the ruins, the fear,

the shoes that can't be filled, hands

that will never stroke her hair.

But listen. And you will hear her small, soft, plaintive voice

(it's already there within you(

a heartbeat, a whisper,

a promise broken(

if only you listen

with your eyes wide open.

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