CPTnet
27 November 2015
CPT
INTERNATIONAL POEM: Advent’s Eve, 2005
by Tim Nafziger*
On that last day of ordinary time
Norman, Harmeet, Jim
and Tom walk across a parking lot
in Baghdad and get into a van.
Years later, Jim can’t remember “those last,
unremarkable motions.”
The
next morning (the first Sunday of Advent)
The
BBC called me at noon.
The
voice at the other end of the line was chasing rumors:
We
heard that four members of Christian Peacemaker Teams were kidnapped.
What
do you know?
What
if Christians took the same risks for peace…
The van exits the lot, abruptly stops;
Men with big guns open the door,
shove the four to the floor
and into the tomb.
That
soldiers do for war?
Waves broke across our ordinary time:
Across the tapestry of CPT
Arriving through phone lines wet with tears
at those four threads ripped away from so many
What
do I know?
Lives
sown together with soft words and shared food:
Fresh
fish from the Opon river at dawn,
warm
stew beneath the trees of Treaty 3 land,
falafel
and pita just beyond Damascus gate on the northern wall
and
hundreds of cheese sandwiches in Chicago
What
do you know?
After three days of frenetic silence
Al-Jazeera showed a video from the Swords of
Righteousness Brigade
with our four friends:
frayed, cut, standing in the light
What
do we know?
Our cheek turning footsteps behind that foolish
fisherman
Our naive refusal to bow down before the AK-47
Our “hobnobbing with the Sunni extremists”
Splashed across the headlines.
Yet the first candle is lit.
We
wait.
*Tim Nafziger was a reservist with Christian
Peacemaker Teams living in London in 2005 during the kidnapping of Norman
Kember, Harmeet Singh Sooden, Jim Loney and Tom
Fox. He wrote this poem for the 10th anniversary of the date they were taken.
Notes
Quote 1: From p. 13 of “Captivity: 118 Days
in Iraq and the Struggle for a World Without War” by James Loney, Vintage Canada Trade, 2012
Quote 2: From “Kember deserved to be
kidnapped, says Tim Collins” by Thomas Harding, The Telegraph, 10 May 2006
Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517955/Kember-deserved-to-be-kidnapped-says-Tim-Collins.html
