The Cradle
by Barbara Bates |  Listen
Iraq
5000 BC - 2003 AD
My ancestor carved it from a cherry tree
that grew on his Ohio land; low and narrow
it had wide rockers that curved up
to fit a foot, to free a hand.
In Sumeria one can still see the clay pins
and mud walls of Babylonia, and in Tell el Obeid,
dun colored mosaics traced flowers
long before Abraham left Ur.
Neither I nor my mother slept in this cradle.
In our nurseries it held only our dolls.
At night unwary people stumbled and swore
to burn it, yet it stuck like old amber
in a corner of ourselves.
There are clay tablets in Tell Harmal
school boys used to draw the hypotenuse
of a right triangle seventeen hundred years
before Euclid's hands served his mind.
My mother ran powdery fingers
along the grain to smooth the sides
with linseed and sandpaper. A pity
all my brains are in my hands, she said,
wanting to preserve this piece of her past,
unmindful that art is mind
in the hand.
Did the Hanging Gardens
console Nebuchadnezzar's homesick queen?
Nothing but fragments of colored glass
now speak of her longing; nothing
but the furrowed wood
of a child's crib tells of the rural hearth
and arduous life that pioneered our beginning.
In l258 the Mongols destroyed
the ancient irrigation, returned the land
to desert, but if one listens to the wind in the sand,
spirits long buried in cuneiform whisper
the ageless curse: wars and horrors are thy savage joy,
said Agamemnon to Achilles. Art
that makes a people immortal --
a pleasure to ravage.
In this century piece after piece
of Afghan sculpture has been lost to Taliban axes
and now American missiles rampage
the remains of old Mesopotamia.
It was our bed, the very same
that held Sarah's and Hagar's children,
the very same that rocked Harun ar-Rashid
and you and me. We save a cradle
to keep our lives, inviolate,
our separate histories
eternal.
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