Plastic Chairs And Fighting Insurgency Poem by Eric Gibson

I'm slowly rocked to sleep by
the way he speaks.
His broken english resembles
a long,
soft note
varying in pitch,
ending with a grin.

I'm watching the tough
Afghan workers as they
bang and saw and
dig...
Some of them are
much too old for manual labor.

They're here for their family's sake.

I'm listening to my Zune.
I watch the Afghans to make sure
they don't wander away from the
work site.

This is my contribution to
counterinsurgency.

Although,
I fear that
I will run out of battery
before we win the war on terror.