Pine-Cone Truce

So this is a blog where I will try to turn a news article into a poem daily.  I will choose articles that interest me, and my poems will be biased.  But I want to remember the news, and its fascinating, but sometimes I don't understand how cool something is when it is presented as a clunky article in a newspaper.  I love images and details and playing with language.

Learn!  Educate yourself about the world!  Knowledge lets you make any decision from a position of power.  If your knowledge is limited you end up making decisions out of necessity because you don't know what else there is.

Comment!  What do you think of what is happening in the world?

(From the New York Times article "Cease-Fire for Harvests Offers Respite in Afghanistan")
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/world/asia/harvesting-cease-fire-offers-respite-in-afghanistan.html?_r=1

Pine-Cone Truce

For eleven months and one

week a year in Paktika Afghanistan,

the battalion receives contact – through

            82-millimeter rounds,

            107-millimeter rockets,

            machine gun fire and

            or rifle fire – from

the Taliban and Haqqani

but September and early Octob-

er are pine-nut season where

village men pick cones with long poles

with loops at the end until their hands grow

black black with dirt and pine

sap.  Once their nuts are removed

from their cones, they fetch $17 per kilo-

gram – how many nuts in a cone?

The Tali and Haqq are no longer nestle-

d but slipp-

ing from their safe haven and they need civilian

protection desperate-

ly, so they coord-

inate fighting and harvesting schedules –

can’t risk losing the civilians (though

another theory declares that most of the Tali

and Haqq’s fighters are local men.  I like this

less.)

(A similar pattern in Afganistan’s poppy

provinces growing.) 

I do with the pine nut

truce lasted

longer?