Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 7: Deliver Us From (Our Own) Evil + Hayan Charara's "Animals"

Sand Opera Lenten Journey Day 7

Gospel MT 6:7-15

Jesus said to his disciples…

This is how you are to pray:

Our Father who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name,

thy Kingdom come,

thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread;

and forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us;

and lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

            --Matthew, 6:7-15

I’ve struggled with what is called “The Lord’s Prayer” or the “Our Father” even as I’ve prayed it, thousands of times, in boredom or fear, sadness or joy. I’ve thought: why “Father,” if God is beyond all human reckoning? Could we not equally say “Our Mother”? And why “in heaven” and not on earth? What of the incarnate Word, of creation as a God’s? I suppose the notion of the Kingdom on earth is supposed to allude to that. I’m on board with “daily bread,” though I’m sure the gluten-free among us would get itchy just from the sound of it. The importance of forgiveness, and the mutuality of forgiveness, seems crucial, though why we’ve translated it as “trespass” requires more explanation. Perhaps my favorite moment is the “but” in the final line; it suggests that temptation may be inevitable, and we may need delivery from evil—that we do, as much as that is done to us.

Today’s poem from Sand Opera, in the voice of one of the abused at Abu Ghraib, testifies to the problem of evil and the miracle of survival. That despite the depradations he faced, he lived. His voice, in the telling, is delivering himself from the evil that he survived. But G, the ubiquitous anti-God Charles Graner, brings “the dogs,” and the dogs are what end the poem. Dogs were one of the instruments of torture used by military police, which is doubly sad given how much comfort that a good dog can provide. Which is why I’m sharing Arab American poet Hayan Charara’s amazing poem “Animals,” from his new book Something Sinister (2016), about his own beloved animals, and the animals his brother cared for in Lebanon when Israel attacked in 2006. The animals that we become to each other.

“Animals” by Hayan Charara

The phone call, from my wife.

She’s hungry, she’s pregnant,

someone kicked her

in the stomach—we have to.

I say yes, but the reply

I keep to myself is,

We don’t have to do a goddamn thing.

A dog. I’m talking about a dog

I would have otherwise left to starve.

Now though, five years since,

I love this animal, Lucy,

more than I can most people.

            •

A boy names his dog and five cats

after our Lucy. The boy, my brother,

born in Henry Ford’s hometown,

lives now in Lebanon,

which the Greeks called Phoenicia,

and they tried but failed

to subdue it, same as the Egyptians,

Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians,

Alexander the Great, Romans, Arabs,

Crusaders, Turks, the British,

the French, the Israelis.

There, my father built a house

with money earned in Detroit—

as a grocer, with social security.

Also there, the first alphabet

was created, the first law school built,

the first miracle of Jesus—

water, wine.

            •

On the first day

the bombs fall they flee

and the boy asks

to go back for Lucy,

the dog. As for the cats,

No. They take care of themselves.

One week into it

he wonders who feeds them,

who fills the water bowls.

Maybe the neighbors,

the mother thinks out loud.

The father is indignant: Neighbors—

what neighbors? They’re gone.

The mother is stunned:

What do you mean, gone?

After a month, everyone forgets

or just stops talking about

the animals. During the ceasefire

my father drives south,

a thirty-minute trip that lasts

six hours—wreckage upon wreckage

piled on the roads, on what is left

of the roads. The landscape

entirely gray, so catastrophic

he asks a passerby how far

to his town and is told,

You’re in it.

            •

My father finds three of the cats,

all perforated, one headless.

The dog is near the carport,

where it hid during lightning storms,

its torso splayed in half

like meat on a slab, its entrails

eaten by other dogs

scavenging on the streets.

Look. They’re animals.

Which is to say, there are also people.

And I haven’t even begun telling you

what was done to them.