Por Vijay Prashad
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First, custom lays the carpets down
and sweeps the courtyard clean;
the cousins come from distant towns,
the bride steps out in green.
Tradition warms the rice and lamb,
the oldest uncle sings;
a child sleeping lightly on a lap,
a mother counts her rings.
In Uruzgan, the rifles spoke,
as wedding rifles do
their little thunder praised the bride
and split the evening blue.
But high above, another custom
studied signs for joy:
a screen went white, a cursor moved,
and death had been deployed.
In Nangarhar, they walked the bride
along the mountain track;
the first bomb struck the children first,
the second called them back.
The third observed tradition too:
it found the bride who fled.
They buried forty-seven lives
in eight and twenty beds.
In Anbar, someone filmed the dance,
the singer and the feast;
by dawn the camera knew more truth
than generals at their screens.
In Rada‘, eleven cars set out,
bright cloth upon the door;
four missiles joined the old routine:
one wedding, then no more.
In Sirik, slippers filled the house,
small, silver, red, and blue;
the bride had scarcely crossed the room
when custom entered too.
For custom is what often comes,
tradition, what is done:
the same excuse, the same report,
the rising of the sun.
‘Our target was a dangerous man’.
‘We acted on a threat’.
The children’s names evade the page;
the ink is scarcely wet.
The wedding has its ancient laws:
give bread, make room, draw near.
The bomber has traditions too:
deny, review, disappear.
Something borrowed crossed the sky,
something old was said;
something new became the grave,
something blue turned red.
So, sing no song to bride or groom,
beat neither drum nor bell.
America keeps its customs still,
and keeps them very well.
This poem builds on the US attacks on wedding parties in Kakarak in Uruzgan (Afghanistan) in 2002, Mogr al-Deeb in Anbar (Iraq) in 2004, Haska Meyna in Nangarhar (Afghanistan) in 2008, Wech Baghtu (Afghanistan) in 2008, and Aqabat Za‘j near Rada‘ (Yemen) in 2013.
Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His most recent book (with Grieve Chelwa) is How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa (from Inkani Books).
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