I wrote this poem March 5, 2003. I was at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. We were looking in on my nephew, who was just a day old. He’ll be 20 this weekend.
Tanks were massing and it was clear that the Bush Administration was intent on invading Iraq, regardless of what the international community said, or what the American peace movement wanted.
Their argument was a lie built on a set of other lies, filtered through the haze of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center 18 months earlier. Condoleeza Rice talked of mushroom clouds, and the supposedly above-the-fray Colin Powell lied to the United Nation about yellowcake uranium.
A few months later, President George W. Bush would don a flight suit and stand on the deck of a destroyer and declare “Mission Accomplished,” even as the war was poised to continue for much of the next decade and our efforts ultimately left behind a dysfunctional and broken nation.
“Letter to Daniel, One Day Old” appears in my chapbook Certainties and Uncertainties, published by Finishing Line Press.