At the Dam
It must be the sun, slowing even the heartiest species, the house sparrows finding the limestone slab strewn with sunflower seeds mid-morning while American and British relatives gobble goldfinch feed by sunrise. The power drill stops breathless after a few minutes, its pounding muted as its energy seeps back to its source, like the Russian generators churning Lake Assad, the old river dammed to a trickle farther north and lost to Turkey’s dimmer light. Cyrillic pronouncements in alien granite dwarf Arabic limestone arabesques more accustomed to the enervating desert, and still nothing happens. The white stone eagle, a legacy of the fifties brought later by Russian Soura whose engineers wrought their cold accounting of Syria’s historic heat.
Swimming to Syria 36
