Between songs, Rahim tells of phoning his mother.
“Why are you doing this to us!” she shouted.

In Baghdad, there is a family they know of seven children.
Each morning one eats breakfast.

“I am not doing it!” Rahim shouted back into the phone.
When last in Iraq, land of his and our alphabet’s birth,
his brothers were sharing one pen. There were no pencils.

Rahim plays the oud, closing his eyes, an evening sky
moving across his face, flights of feeling in his fingers. Listen,
they’re singing of children he taught there, of breakfasts
not eaten, of mornings he was a boy with brothers
in his mother’s kitchen. In Baghdad’s presidential palace,
in the White House, no one thinks about pencils.
I watch Rahim’s hands, the way his fingers open the strings,
setting free the heart’s longing, a soft rush of wings—

and how do I tell now the way his hands, these chords
take me back to September 11th, not our 9/11
but 30 years before to the day, when we—
our government—killed one of liberty’s songbirds
in Santiago, Chile, the fingers he played guitar with
broken, his country handed over to the brutes.
Something is suspicious here, an army major said
weeks later to the poet Pablo Neruda, while they
ransacked his house of books and seashells for a reason

to arrest him. Yes, Neruda said, it’s poetry.

From Rahim’s fingers now, this wind of blood and flowers.