Thirteen Years Later
Theology pushes us towards silence,
Peter said,
or wrote, rather, at some point during his years in
Baghdad. This would have been some time before
the year he played a recording of the adhan in class,
the year he stood -- or sat, more likely -- at the front
of the classroom and said he thought Arabic would be
a beautiful language to do theology in. I didn’t know
enough, then, to wonder at the way language fails.
I didn’t think about how maybe he was out of
words. I was eighteen years old, that first year
he was my teacher.
Ahlan wa-sahlan,
Louis coached us, bouncing up on the balls of his feet,
smiling at a semester’s worth of garbled consonants
tripping up against the dreaded ayin. It should be
the most beautiful letter, he told us, made us repeat words
after him again and again until the sounds had
lost all meaning.
It was two years after I came home,
two years after I walked the streets of Damascus
every day for a month, two years after I climbed the stairs
to the monastery an hour outside the city limits
before I learned that Father Paolo had disappeared.
Presumed dead, the report stated quietly, executed
by Syrian rebels.
You are writing the same poem
again and again, my poetry professor told me that spring.
I was ten years old when the towers fell. The neighbor kids
all gathered in my backyard, like usual, except this time we knelt
in a circle and James led us in the Lord’s prayer.
… as we forgive those who trespass against us …
No, I don’t understand any of it: twenty-three and still a child.
Who were the men who hijacked the planes, I wonder.
What were they like, as children?
There is no room here for naïveté.
I have seen the photographs of people jumping from the windows,
twenty floors above the ground, and yet --
Dialogue is an exercise in beauty,
Father Paolo said. His whole face changed when he smiled;
his eyes disappeared into slits before the force of his joy, crow’s feet
turning into deep creases. I want to believe he might be right;
even then,
even now.