In-Processing

The tent was overheated
They wanted us to sweat off the juice of our identities
We stood bewildered as our past loves dripped, rolled and poured into the sand
Memories, however stuck to the tent flaps and the television and the radio and the plastic food
What we had been would stay
We naively believed that the sand and dirt that clung to our bodies that night
could be washed off...forgotten...
It transformed us, it made us all desert creatures
Stay or leave, live or die, in pain or happiness;
The heat, the sand, the desert owns us now,
And we yearn for it, and watch for it, in little houses at night...alone...
And our memories; embedded in the tents
and the televisions and the radios and
the plastic food are packed away in connex boxes
and wait for us somewhere in the Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad...
We must begin again...
-- By Sylvia Blackwood