Scott Carrier, whose photographs we feature in this issue of Dialogue, is an independent writer and radio producer. His print stories have been published in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, QQ, and Mother Jones magazines. His radio…
Tanker from al-Kuwayt on the Persian Gulf
Passes the Straits of Hormuz (which Americans hold),
With a cargo of “black gold”—
Gas and petroleum—
For further refinement in Galveston.
She pictures heavy boots, plodding through sand,
and wonders if the socks she knitted fit him.
In sundown-smoky Baghdad, her Marine digs trenches,
longing for double beds and salt-rimmed tequilas,
I grew up with toy machine guns, plastic army men, and John Wayne movies on a black and white television set. We read the Book of Mormon as a family every morning before school, and…
Across a shattered street, a Muslim groom lifts
the train of his Christian bride as he steps over
broken glass, old tires, and miles of rubblestone.
Her face, a dark rose, is the only beauty
in this ravaged landscape.
Out of the corner of her eye, Leila watched a woman and her husband climb into the Peugeot taxi that Leila was taking from Oran to Algiers. The woman wrapped her black haik close against…
Dialogue 37.1 (Spring 2004): 180–187
It was as I waded through the sewage, stagnant in the streets of one of Africa’s biggest slums—Mukuru, Nairobi, Kenya—while on an assignment with the Community of Christ-sponsore WorldService Corps in summer 2000, that I was first struck by the enormity of the world’s problems and the horrifying conditions faced by the majority of its inhabiants.
The history of empires and nation-states is often a chronicle of wars, as this sprinkling of names clearly evokes: Ghengis Khan, Attila the Hun, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, William T. Sherman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh. The twentieth century, the bloodiest and most war-crazed in the history of the world, has alone been responsible for combat in which “not less than 62 million civilians have perished, nearly 20 million more than the 43 million military personnel killed.”
I am a child of the sixties. I mean this in a more literal sense than is generally understood: I was a child during the 1960s. One result is that I have a distinctive view…
A little over twenty years ago on a beautiful July day in London when the sun glittered in a cloudless sky, warm breezes blew the music of the Royal Green Jackets band across Hyde Park. English families and tourists wandered the park or settled themselves on the grass and benches to listen.