Even the Tin Man Had a Heart.

• Author: Harshman, Marc
• Position: Poem - Brief Article - Poem

I was not at home but wandering a demolition site, the air acrid with sulfuric shreds of headlines. "We will not listen, we will not listen, we will not listen." I heard the chant in English and it seemed wrong. I heard the chant and wondered if it was the latest pop and it seemed wrong. It seemed wrong because I was not in the States or Britain or Canada, but I was in a very hot place and it was called Hell, it was called the Middle East, it was called Iraq. And I didn't know what I was doing there but it was here and gone. It was a waste place doubly damned. It was a land full of craters bombed twice. And an old man, he was a grandfather, wandered the wasted street, and there was a little boy uplifted into the arms of a naked tree and he just hung there, limp, a narrow branch skewered into him, entering below his collar bone and exiting his back just under his right shoulder, and this had not yet killed him, and his sister, it was, lay face down, neatly; in the sand, perfectly intact, it...