Will we ever know peace in this lifetime? Will the day come when people just walk free and we agree to disagree and let each other just be?  Today I read that there is yet another Guantanamo Bay, only this time it is Bagram Airfield and it is related to the war in Afghanistan.

This past weekend I found myself in a very interesting conversation about war and why we even go to war. Is there anything so bad and so intolerable that we have to take a human life? I have heard it said that there are things worth dying for and things worth fighting for but are there really things worth killing for? Have we not come far enough as a species to just agree to ignore each other and pretend like the other person does not exist? That is not the same as killing someone else, it is a pretend killing, historically teenage girls are great at this and I find this wise and that it works well when I am angry.

There are many methods we could use to avoid war but for whatever reason it consumes the human psyche. Maybe Oscar Wilde is right: “As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.”

The truth is was is vulgar and messy. The tragedy of war is obvious in what it does to the people involved and the prisoners. War can make us commit crimes that are less than human.

If you Google a book: “the Detainees Speak”, one of the editors states that there is an old Arabic saying: “poetry is borne of suffering”. Which is why the book was written, so we could learn that in their darkest hour prisoners in Guantanamo Bay turned to poetry, they traded poetry as one would trade drugs – passing around cups etched with the words of some of the famous poets in the world, to give each other hope. Of the 775 men held in this facility, less than 50% of these men had committed any hostile act against the USA or its allies but because they were prisoners they had no voice and in desperation they turned to poetry.

What kind of a world are we living in when men are so imprisoned and so desperate for a voice that they etch the words of famous men on Styrofoam cups with pebbles and use toothpaste to write poetry as screams? There are times when I tell myself to write beautiful things and I do but then the next day I read about men so tortured they could not talk to their lawyers; instead they handed them poetry in an attempt to remain sane. And I ask: why?

At first writing materials were banned in Guantanamo and prisoners used toothpaste, fingernails and even stones to carve out verses. Believe it or not, poetry was considered dangerous because of its imagery – apparently this imagery can convey coded messages (something I do not doubt) to militants on the outside. Who knew poetry could be risque? Lawyers of course, argued that the only reason poetry was considered dangerous was because it would convey the truth to civilians outside and they would be the ones to bring down the house. Poetry is the inspiration of deep suffering so can we expect another poetry book from Bagram Airfield and how will we live with the pain of those words?

Below is one of the poems by an inmate at Guantanamo:

Death Poem by Jumah al Dossari

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace”.