This Time Of War
On the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King the United States bombed the people of Iraq. A great man. We remember. My friend’s beautiful sister wears a diamond nose ring, not at all like the heavy iron ring in the nose of a bull. Here the shaman sits with his drum and his eyes on Heaven. They say when the drum dies so too the shaman. Not true. All the world is a bomb shelter that does not work. Shhh! The trees do not know. Nor the birds and grasses. The earth. I yelled at my wife and daughter. I cursed the frozen bolts, cutting them off to put a new muffler on the car I needn’t drive. I’m eating ice cream and cookies and drinking licorice tea. Rich foods I eat so rarely. Now seems the right time. There is a stone wall that rises in the door to my bedroom each night. Each morning I tear it down and enter the day.
My Father And The Buddha
I go to the library with my questions. It never occurs to me to ask my father. I look up Buddhism and ask the Buddha. The page is dim. The Buddha grins, no answer of any kind, more questions. After my father’s death I ask him about this. He has never heard of the Buddha and tells me he suspects religion of any kind. Not religion so much as men claiming religion — talking about it or preaching or doing things to other men and women. First, they drop water on a child, they place a wafer on a youth’s tongue, they offer wine to an old man. “These are Catholic rites,” I say. “It’s what I know,” my father says. “First these, then the next thing, you turn around, they’ve started a war and millions are dead.” “Not the Buddhists,” I claim. “They rarely start wars.” My father wonders if this could be true. He leans on his hand and looks out the window onto the Sonora Desert where I grew up, the saguaro cactus and ocotillo and sunbathing snakes. A smile spreads across his broad face. I turn to see what has happened and am surprised that my father is outside shoveling deep snow off the warm earth.
