Taliban Kill 10 on Aid Trip in Afghanistan
—New York Times, August 7, 2010
And one thinks, of course, of the evolution
of whales, how they left the sea by dint
of drift and flow, lived on land for tens
of millions of years, then slipped back
into the warm and shallow waters
of a vanished ocean, littering the heart
of Islam with their bones. They were eye
doctors and nurses, trekking through
the Hindu Kush on foot, with medicines
and, regrettably, a Bible in the local tongue.
The red-bearded gunmen perceived
no profit in their passing through,
could focus only on that leather-
bound miscellany of yarns and spells
so different from their own. Feet
became fins, tails flattened into flukes,
the pelvis detached itself from the spine,
eyes migrated from front to sides:
every mutation in blind service
to an underwater song, to the joyous
breach and splash of tail against waves.
What could they be but spies,
and the punishment for spying there
is death. Their respective books
were no doubt called upon, parables
of God’s mercy invoked, but while Jonah
was saved from the belly of the whale
by penitence and prayer, mere devotion
is no longer sufficient for the killers
or the killed. The land’s now dry
and mountainous and for a while longer
no one’s likely to see well, though change,
all the stories tell us, all the evidence
of suffering and hope insists, change
is the world’s true and only will.
