Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2008, page 56

Music & Arts

D.C. Poets Against the War Recite at Haunting Botero Exhibition

	(L-r) Tala Rahmeh recites her poem as (l-r) Rose Marie Berger, Joseph Ross, D. Nurkse and E. Ethelbert Miller listen (Staff photo B. Awad).

TODAY, I’M DECIDING to write about you
So that you can live with me
Hold my shadow’s hand
And walk beside the world that turned its back to you

—from “70,100” by Tala Rahmeh

Members of D.C. Poets Against the War recited some of their original poetry to a packed house on Nov. 10, at The American University’s (AU) Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC. The poets spoke amid an exhibition of Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib series, a stark collection capturing the horror of torture committed by American soldiers at the infamous Iraqi jail.

Among the poets reading their works  was Tala Rahmeh, a Palestinian pursuing an MFA in creative writing at American University. Her poem “70,100” is included in Cut Loose the Body, a collection of poetry on war published by D.C. Poets Against the War and the AU Museum. An explanatory note at the end of Rahmeh’s poem reads: “70,100 is the number of civilian casualties in Iraq the day the poem was written. It will be larger every time you read this poem.”

—Basem Awad