War Roses

Afghanistan

“I heard on the radio that we creatures have about a billion and a half heartbeats to use. Birds use theirs first as do meth heads and stockbrokers. This morning I’m thinking of recounting mine to see exactly where I am. I warn the hummingbirds out front, ‘just slow down,’ as they chase me away from the falling hollyhocks.”

-from the poem “Sunday Discordancies” by Jim Harrison 

I’m still trying to come to terms with living in a place without time for so long vs. this new place, where the ticking of clock’s razor-sharp hand cuts peoples’ lives into pieces.

Last year in Afghanistan I flew over a bombed-out castle splayed across a high hill overlooking the sprawling city of Kabul.  From the helicopter I could see inside the castle’s great depths, through the twisted remnants of its shattered blue dome, into the dead skeleton inside.  Inside there was a spiral staircase leading to nowhere.  Obviously ancient, the castle was surrounded by a bombed-out stone court with red and pink roses persevering in its fissures and rubble.  War roses, as they are called in Afghanistan.    

I’ve dreamed about that castle and its rose garden and staircase, spiraling not to nowhere, but up through the broken blue glass into a sky dotted with heavy clouds.  On the staircase was not the king, but all his villagers, climbing in pairs, holding hands. 

I think about our billion and a half heartbeats, enough to last eighty years, give or take.  I think about the people of Afghanistan whom are born with half that many, if they are lucky.  I think about how interminable terror and insecurity have robbed them of gratefulness, symptomatic in that they stopped tending the rose gardens, once such a symbol of their grace, gratitude, pride and humanity.  Now they are war roses, left to survive alone in gunpowder places roses aren’t supposed to grow.   

Last year I’d work in a rose garden in the courtyard of a tiny mosque.  It was unkept and overgrown, so I did what I could to prune, rake, mow, sweep and plant.  One day an Afghan woman approached me saying, “I cry every day thinking about this garden.  How you, an American, are its keeper.  How ironic, heh?”  Then she said, “This is the problem with my country.  We don’t take care of our roses anymore.”