The Photographer Poem by Carlos Suarez

Once the first rocket attack was over and you realized you were still there.
Once you managed to get back your hands that had clawed the dirt, and straightened your body that had been curled python-like around the camera bag.
Once you made eye contact again with your respected colleagues and the platoon’s survivors.
Once the buzzing in your head stopped and you could hear again the voices and the rain.
Then you started realizing something else had happened... something light and pale and durably beautiful like the clawing roots of theTillandsia, what in your land is called ‘carnation of the air’, the dusty green tiny plant that lives hanging from the trees and sometimes shows those very small horizon-red flowers...
You had lost your fears -all your fears.
That realization didn’t make you a man, or a courageous man, but it made you for ever an alien in the world of those who haven’t seen the killing and the dying, the brutal dark thing that the soul of humanity has carried around for millennia and once again expressed itself in battle. But you didn’t know it yet.

You continued going up and down those soaked hill, hitching rides in Hueys and gun boats, photographing the faces of hell and hearing the screams of the wounded, and getting soaked in blood moving their twitching bodies in and out of the medevac choppers, because in some ways you had become one of them, the ones who like yourself lost all fears and considered themselves already dead, and all they had to do was keep working or get hit and go back home limping, twitching, or in a body bag.

Home... To the West Village, to play chess at the cafe while waiting to see her again...


Because she maybe loved you -as she put it- and you wanted her with a thirst and a hunger that told you you had to stay alive, just to be able to be again with her at Chumley’s talking about old books, and then walk together to pier 14 to look at the kite flyers until it got too dark and you had no film left to get that smile, that vaulted forehead and those Champagne shoulders...

That was what did it to you. The fear came back through that door.
So you started to fear again, and it showed in your few sweaty and trashed dreams as in your never sent letters and the calls made to a phone she never answered. The fear that contaminated everything but those fire fights you kept photographing until you couldn’t think any longer and you clawed the dirt and screamed.

But when you came back and she saw you again, you felt that empty space she filled with a smile and some distracted questions, and you knew she was afraid.
Afraid of the madness brought back from the war.
Afraid of the differences, the way you walked and sat and looked at the streets and the people as if from very far... So you left her alone, and slowly, slowly, you started feeling again that fearlessness in that world of the peaceful and the fearful, and you started living as an exile because it would have been almost impossible loving someone again and still feel that the carnation of the air kept blooming on those high branches... Because nobody else could even imagine what is to be alive and without fear, another lone talker with a camera bag walking around and humming old Jazz tunes in the beautiful green hell under that old rain.