How Shall We Sing the Lord's Song?

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something

that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult

to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack

of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned

and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
--
William Carlos Williams
“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

It is a miserable death, I think, to die unheard, unheeded, alone. Cut off from friends, family, all that is familiar, men and women find methods to assuage their madness. Poetry beckons. Songs of lament. In the Bible, we call them Psalms. In the eyes of the United States government, we call them "classified." Not fit for public view. Potential vehicles for terror.

Poems written by prisoners at Guantanamo will likely not be allowed to be published.

By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down, yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song;
and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?
Psalm 137

These may be the times that try men's souls, but suffer in silence please.

We will not require of you a song. We will not ask you to entertain us, your masters, as you sing us songs of your longing for redemption and freedom. Instead, we want you to be quiet. We do not want to hear, just as we do not want to see.

But most of the poems, including the lament by Al Hela which first sparked Falkoff's interest, are unlikely to ever see the light of day. Not content with imprisoning the authors, the Pentagon has refused to declassify many of their words, arguing that poetry "presents a special risk" to national security because of its "content and format". In a memo sent on September 18 2006, the team assigned to deal with communications between lawyers and their clients explains that they do not "maintain the requisite subject matter expertise" and says that poems "should continue to be considered presumptively classified".

G*d forbid you write poetry. Poetry? Really? What's next? Rap music? You write poetry and expect us not to suspect you of passing secret messages to your outside buddies? If you must write poetry, and really, we think you musn't, then the least we can require is that you be published in English. English. The language of your captors. That way, we know that your comrades-in-arms won't be able to use these poems to agitate for your freedom.

Only one of the authors in the forthcoming collection wrote poetry before his incarceration. The religious scholar Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost wrote 25,000 lines of poetry during his time in the camp, only a handful of which have been returned to him. A poem he wrote on a Styrofoam cup and reconstructed from memory after his release appears in Poems from Guantánamo. The other detainees were not poets before their incarceration, but have turned to poetry under the particular pressures of their situation.

I write my poems on a styrofoam cup. It is a bit like using a wax tablet. I can use my fingernails to carve my words into the soft, white flesh of my drinking vessel. But, even that you did not allow me to keep. So, I carved the words into the soft, fleshy bits of my brain and let them bleed upon the page when you finally released me from my torment.

Sorry. I was thinking about the styrofoam cup, how desperate for pen and paper I would be if I found myself locked up, cut off, silenced. It was rumoured that the Marquis de Sade wrote on the walls of his cell with his own excrement, so desperate was he. But perhaps that's a literary fluorish. Why wouldn't he be given pen and paper? How frightened must one be to forbid writing?

These men wrote poetry. How many Americans even read poetry?

No wonder the people asked to evaluate whether the writings of the prisoners constituted "banned speech." Did they even understand what it was that they were reading?

Yeah, we wept.
Jesus wept.
Weep for us all.

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