Mutanabi Street

In March 2007, a car bomb exploded in the heart of Baghdad’s centuries-old literary center, igniting bookstores and stationery shops.

Pages flit above the ruined bookstalls:
blank or dark with words, it doesn’t matter.

Paper is as dangerous as ink—as thought.
And as for the student who was reading

in a dim café, the old men buying envelopes
across the lane, flames turned them to light,

then ash, with chemical indifference.
War tossed a match and stayed to watch

the old block burn—journals, histories,
novels, verse, dictionaries, textbooks,

anatomy primers with charts of the body
like maps of a familiar country—shops on fire

with what’s been written and what hasn’t:
the script in which mercy might repeat itself.

—Jody Bolz