Baghdad: Paradise Lost

by FELICITY ARBUTHNOT

‘They make a desolation and call it peace
Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?’

Agha Shaid Ali, The Country Without a Post Office, Poems 1991-1995.

‘The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew and locusts came,
Great is the hand that holds Dominion,
Over Man, by a scribbled name.’

Dylan Tomas, 1914-1953.

It was blogger BlaiseP who on 22 May expressed the senseless horror, the destruction of the irreplaceable, in another Iraq tragedy. He wrote of a man he had never met and of a grief despairing, hopeless, immitigable:

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