The War in Iraq
By Candace Mitchell

Pooling outward from the hole
Viscous liquid
Spreads symmetrically, bleeding out.

The blood creeps constantly drawing
Further from the sprawled body.

I am fascinated by the curved edge
Created by the steady flow
Much like the arc of a circle.

Most surely there is a mathematician
Somewhere
Who could calculate the expanding radius
Of this circle that
Will never be whole
Much like its source: the hole

Shot through the neck of the
Young helmeted soldier.

Little good the helmet did.
Perhaps a scarf of knight’s mail would
Better serve
To ward off the snipers’ shots
Trained on the necks of young soldiers sent
To war without shields for protection,
Ordered to hunt down others:

The insurgents.
An enemy unidentified
Yet known by
The commonality of its apparent humanity lost
Now wrenched from reality into gutters of sewage
Mounds of severed limbs
Dead children
Crying mothers
Decapitated fathers.

Democracy will rain
Blood red drops splashing tiny circles
No longer bound to the hole in a dead soldier’s neck
But everywhere severing limb and life and hope.

What is the radius of each blood drop?

The objectivity allows the carnage to continue.
The business of war.
Who profits?
Why fight?

Purpose, goals, democracy, ferreting out terrorists.
1,000, 2,000, 3,000, now 4,000 dead American soldiers.
Fifty times more
The number of Iraqi civilians
Whose lives are lost
As their land is made safe for democracy.

Images of children holding colored balloons
Smiling in a safe zone
For it’s too dangerous to focus
On the radius of each blood drop
Unseen yet easily imagined
Much like the flag covered caskets
Smuggled home so only the dead
Enemy is seen.

Vile terrorists kidnapping, maiming,
Butchering.

So unlike the peacekeepers sent to swath
The land in a veil of democracy only
To be met by snipers’ bullets
Leaving holes in soldiers’ bodies
And explosive devices blasting much
Of the peacekeepers’ bodies away.

So it rains blood drops.
And blood circles pool
And flag-draped caskets arrive home clandestinely.
Each soldier so encased
Having left his blood behind
To congeal along with the blood of terrorists,
Collaborators, civilians, members of the coalition,
Insurgents, doctors, nurses, journalists.

What shall become of all the blood?
And what is the radius of a blood drop?

The theater of war.
Who profits?
Why fight?

Candace Mitchell is an associate professor of applied linguistics in a graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she teaches courses and does research in critical discourse analysis, literacy and culture and narrative analysis. She was managing editor of the Boston University Journal of Education for 10 years during which time the journal published such reknown radical educational theorists and researchers as Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren, and Jonathan Kozol, among others and under the eyes BU's legendary president, John Silber, a staunch conservative. She co-edited (with Kathleen Weiler) Rewriting Literacy: Culture and the Discourse of the Other, which won the American Educator's Award for Excellence, and authored Writing and Power (Paradigm Publishers, 2004).