—Iraq

Another form of the invisible—

oblivion that overtook the marsh
when armored vehicles rolled through the reeds
of Eden’s long-lost site, which had dried up
abruptly after river water, dammed,
meandered elsewhere.
Soldiers overthrew
the few remaining native residents
eventually displaced to camps or slums
Sumerians who lived in the suburbs
of Ur would find familiar.
All of this
to punish people who rebelled.
They tell a miserable ancient tale.

Lately we need old views from overhead
to meditate on how they lived—the mere
material of it: their islands mud
from flooded plains, their fences and houses
made out of common reeds. Surrounding them,
reminders of the way that they survived
and thrived here for six thousand years.
Farther—
there, out of sight, in a form of kismet—
tamarisks persist despite the tumult
and multiply in barren saline soil
spoiled by constant desiccation. Deep roots
too long to follow to their ends intrude. . .
When introduced elsewhere they have “displaced the native species.”
Thus we see the job
and problem of forgetting.

Thom Schramm is the author of The Leaf Blower (Blue Cubicle Press) and the editor of Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression (Eastern Washington University Press). His poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Scholar, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Smartish Pace. Schramm resides in Seattle, Washington.

Marsh Dwellers in the Hor

By Thom Schramm