Missing Music

         I had heard a lot about what war was really like before I went to Iraq. One of the things I had heard was that war was 90% boredom and 10% sheer terror. I should like to amend that to 99.9% boredom and 0.1% sheer terror. Boredom may even be a greater enemy than the flies or the disease. During the time in Suwayrah, with little to do and much time to think, I began to miss home. I began to miss my friends. After hearing music for the first time in months, I began to miss it terribly too.

         At our next operating base back in Al-Kut, I was writing home to a musician in New Orleans, Hannibal. He was a friend and mentor of mine for many years before I went to Iraq. At a loss for some of the interactions that we had, I closed the letter “Waiting for the Music, Jason”. Immediately after I had penned it, the phrase grew a life of its own and in just a few more moments I had the following poem. Fortunately, I would not have to wait much longer for the music.

Waiting for the music

And longing for the freedom

Of the gifts that God has given me,

Sooner to return

And never to forget

The language that will pacify the world,

May I always be alive with

And ever conscious of

The visions of love He has made in us

-So that I may paint the worlds ears

in their color.

 

***When I was serving in Iraq, being totally cut off from music, I came to miss it very much on the rare ocassion that I heard the locals play. So in an effort to find some creative outlet I turned to poetry and letter-writing, having no more options than those.Of the poems I wrote, the one above was about missing music. Oddly enough, when I returned home and returned to music, I began to miss Iraq and my friends there as much as I had missed the music there. For them, and for the part of me that I left behind in Iraq I wrote "Missing Kut"

Al-Kut is the center for the arts in southern Iraq and the home of many of my friends. I am playing on the 'ud that was built for me by Hisham al-Hashim of Baghdad.