This Is My House

About two-thirds down on the page of the Baghdad Musem (http://www.baghdadmuseum.org/) is a snippet of text, an extract from a Mesopotamian text thousands of years old.

It touched me.

I'm also ashamed by it, because it illustrates how little humans have learned in this time about human suffering, and that one of the basic paradoxes about human existence is how prolific inhumanity still is:

Dead men, not potsherds
littered the way.
In the wide streets
where the crowds once gathered and cheered,
the corpses lay scattered.
In the fields where the dancers once danced
the dead were heaped up in piles.......

This is my house:

where food is not eaten,
where drink is not drunk,
where seats are not sat in,
where beds are not made,
where jars lie empty,
and cups are overturned,
where harps no longer vibrate
and tunes no longer sing.

This is my house:

without a husband,
without a child,
without even
me.

Photo by Buddy Stone
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/50087332@N00/444492912/)