What do you do when you can’t sleep?  Too much caffeine maybe?  Or is it the picture of the kid that haunts me?  I’ve been thinking of him since this past Wednesday when I glimpsed his picture in the NY Times.  The boy lives in Aleppo. He was pulled bleeding but alive from the rubble after an air strike on the city.  His brother was killed.  His name is Omran Daqneesh  .

About the same time of the week the paper ran a photo of a Russian TU-22 M3 that is using a Iranian airbase to make bombing runs on Aleppo.  A Russian weapon from Iran, randomly by chance — kills anyone who happens to be under it’s stick of high explosives.  This kid barely escapes with his life, for now.  I have no words to make sense of this event, unfolding for months, represented by the face of the child.

East Coker IV

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind us of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

T. S. Eliot