He writes a line about the night in Iraq when his captain lay wounded on the ground with no life in his eyes: "No answer could be given; the shrapnel could not tell us why we bleed."
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G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times José Díaz, who spent nine months in Iraq at Abu Ghraib, expresses his experiences with poetry. |
By describing his reality, his descriptions affirm it somehow. War, he writes, "is easy enough to leave physically, but almost impossible to depart emotionally."
Mr. Díaz , 35, who came to the United States from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift in 1980, has written a poem included in "Voices in Wartime" (Whit Press, 2005), an anthology that explores the experience of war through literature.
Mr. Díaz , an information technology manager for a New Jersey chemical company, lives in Rutherford, N.J., and writes wherever and whenever: using a notebook in a bouncy Humvee in a convoy in Iraq, using a recorder in a car on the Garden State Parkway, punching poem fragments into his cellphone when he was floored by the differences between New York and Abu Ghraib, where he was stationed for nine months in 2004.
"Before, the city always meant joy, fun and laughter," he said of New York. "But I couldn't tear myself away from that little patch of land very far away, and that night." He has memories of hearing his captain asking another friend to take care of his children.
Of the memories, he said, "Writing poetry is a way of making them safer and not letting them run away with you."
He said he came back from Iraq more cynical, aggressive and on edge.
"On the one hand you're disturbed by the very things that make you stronger, unique, different and insightful about this world."
Mr. Díaz began writing poetry with a club that met at Havana Bay Coffee in North Bergen, N.J., starting with love poems. "I can't do that anymore," he said, recalling children in Iraq living off the garbage of Americans stationed there. "Love seems like a trivial subject to write about."
He shows fragments that will become his next poem, "Had We Known."
He has changed the word "inhale" to "hum" in this line about the call to prayer, which often preceded mortar attacks: "Once more, it was our fate to hum the call of the muezzin."
In the final version, he looks at his friend's eye, and sees it move.
It's green, thank God! Exhale! Inhale!
And forget what lies beyond the line of sight.
Confine it now and then to the realm of our repose.