HINDSIGHT

You should be reading this from the bottom up, because the poem below follows from the shooting reference in my last piece. It also links to a poetry-reading we went to in Swansea the other night, with a former US soldier Brian Turner reading from his book Here Bullet. One of his poems (In the Leupold scope) sees life in Iraq through the site of a gun and reminds me of mine from Bethlehem. It's addressed to an Israeli conscript. I call it Just Looking, but its power, if any, lies in the possibility of not just looking. In a village near Nablus two years earlier I was introduced to a little girl with a bandage round her head. Her scalp had been grazed by a bullet from an Israeli settlement high on the hill above. The bullet could not have come her way by chance. Not a ricochet, or crossfire: there had been no battle going on. I photographed the girl where she had been standing, in the back yard of her family home. Now it seemed like a game, but behind her I could also see the outline of settlement buildings atop the ridge. Someone up there must have found her in his sight, and pulled the trigger. As a child with an air rifle, I was shocked when I hit a robin perched high on a tree. I must have been about 15, old enough to know better, but the robin had seemed so small and far away, the odds against hitting it so high.

JUST LOOKING

My flat in Bethlehem looked down on a curious religious site called Rachel's Tomb. A small domed building overlooking a Muslim cemetery has been squared up and fortified as a Jewish pilgrimage venue. From my balcony I can watch the changing of the guard and soldiers taking up positions as coaches full of pilgrims pull up in the dust. One soldier covers the main road, another the smaller road that leads down past the cemetery to the Aida refugee camp. Sometime boys throw stones and the soldiers shoot teargas and soundgrenades to drive them off. On this occasion, a boy's head appears above the cemetery wall and a soldier raises his gun.


Just looking, you say,
And I,
In hindsight
Reply:

A cat
May look at
A queen
But not down the scope
Of an M16...

Soldier, reflect
As you watch
The boy
Behind the graveyard wall
Watch you.

Your gunsight sees
What he cannot.
His features,
Shaving mirror sharp,
So much
Like yours.

Eye for eye?

If looks could kill...
Your other self
He knows
A bullet
From a stone.