The Sifting Sands I was there: Afghanistan, with the mujhagidine. I remember gaunt-looking soviet soldiers inhaling short drags of cheap cigarettes with blankets of snow bedding down great mountains. I had friends who fell under the French paratroopers bayonets in Algeria. My eldest son fell in Lebanon clutching his rifle in his right hand and the Koran I gave to him as a boy. My memories are as scarred as this land, this middle east that the cartographers name so vaguely. And now I have returned with my three surviving sons and several men from my ancestral village-at least the place that was ours until 1948. My name is Mohammad al Bawati, or al Saif, the sword, to the Americans. I was born as the second of the great wars had ended, yet the embers of struggle and injustice remained burning ins tensely like the Saudi sun of the Arabia Peninsula. The end of war was not the end of bloodshed; the shouts of Allahu Akbar did not conclude the costliest war man had ever known.

An old relationship without closure is naught but a relic buried in the sand. And not beyond reach of rediscovery.

Pedes Mortuus Publius Sertorois gazed at the expanse beyond the frontier; a confused mess of thick forests and treacherous mosquito enflamed swamps lazily returned the glare. The leaves russelled in the near distance and the hum of disease carrying insects spoke in the breeze that was both strong and chilly. Sounds indeed, but absent of the duel plagues of war and rapine that the heretic barbarians exported into the crumbling Roman line