Margaret Ricketts

Margaret Ricketts is one of the better political poets I know. So when she mentioned to me the other day that she had a poem called “Saddam in his Underwear” that nobody would publish because it was too controversial, I asked her to let me take a look at it. She said she was told the poem provoked a lot of discussion but still, the publishers wouldn’t put it in print.

Saddam Hussein was an evil man. Saddam Hussein is safely dead. The manner of his dying was shameful, but one might argue the past is buried with Saddam. Not so, I argue. I think we should remember and learn. Saddam was, in many ways, our creature. As was Manuel Noriega. I think we should get out of the Frankenstein business.

Anyway, here’s the poem. Make of it what you will. Tell me what you think of it.

__________

Saddam in His Underwear

May 2005

Julia and I are sitting at the bar in Kramerbooks when he came up on the
screen – Saddam in his underwear, bare-chested and vulnerable. I couldn’t stop
looking at all that curly black hair. Monster to mortal. It’s not the person,
it’s the principle.

Julia sees me agape. ‘’Oh yeah, only you would even be surprised.’’ I toss a ten
on the bar, stalk off to go browse the stacks. Saddam in his Jockeys scares me
worse than almost anything else during these long three years, just as bad as
Abu Ghraib. Humiliation as tool of statecraft. I had believed there were limits,
rules, boundaries, even in this world, before tonight.

Julia and I go sit on the benches curving around the fountain. Dupont Circle –
home of gay yuppies, the Philips Collection, many embassies featured in the
Amnesty International annual report, the only part of the city that feels at home
with itself. I point out to Julia that the naked dictator is just an emblem, a
symbol of just how deeply we’re willing to dig our thumb into the world’s
eyeball.

Julia sighs, not unkindly ‘’But Margaret you’re thinking about it like it matters
and they, they’re just getting their rocks off.’’ Julia thinks her cynicism is going
to shield her, the way I think keeping half a wary eye on the sewer covers is
going to keep me safe. Both of us are too smart to really buy our defense
systems.

If you don’t look too close, this is an ordinary evening. I cling to the side of the
escalator. This longing for some undefinable justice- a thirst, a wound, a
pretense? Alone, Julia would run to the bottom, lithe and fleet. She knows I
can’t follow, so she stands still.

If justice were water, would it lull us to sleep or slap us awake?

— Margaret Ricketts