WAR PAPERS: POETRY 2;
Dedication


Compiled and Edited by
Halvard Johnson

 


Czeslaw Milosz, Dedication

You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.

What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,
Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty,
Blind force with accomplished shape.

Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.

Warsaw, 1945 


Contents

Czeslaw Milosz Dedication

Keith Wilson / fr. "Graves Registry," #1
Robert Sward / Report from the Front
Rebecca Kavaler / Iphigenia
Harriet Green / Idle Thoughts
Tad Richards / October
Jennifer Compton / Somewhere in Europe
Joel Solonche / Last Night I Had a Dream
Chris Mansell / Some Wars Are Silent
Steve Dalachinsky / Army (for Mary Jo)
Jéanpaul Ferro / The elementary particles
Hugh Fox / Insomnia
H. Palmer Hall / Mortar with Crow: a prose poem in eight parts
Louis Armand / Three Testiments to Apollonius
Gay Partington Terry / Backyard Invocation
John M. Bennett / De bris
Paul C. Howell / A Wall of the Heavenly Palace by Wu Choi
Eileen Tabios / Post-Autobiography
Harriet Zinnes / Forming a Word
Philip Metres / One more story  he said   In a restaurant in Amsterdam
Ruth Lepson / Reading Joseph Brodsky on the Treadmill
Edward Field / What Poetry Is For
Susan Donnelly / After Fallujah
Neil Nelson / "I Am the Guard"
Larissa Shmailo / Exorcism 1992
Hal Sirowitz / The 'V' That Changed
Laura Lentz / Another Poem About the War
Jeffrey Beam / The Other
Frank Parker / Tombstone
Alan Sondheim / "i meditate upon the ten directions"
Murat Nemet-Nejat / A Dedication to Bush and Skulls and Bones
Sheila Black / Star-Gazing Wars
Barbara Crooker / An Extreme Material Breech at an Undisclosed
Secret Location
Richard Kostelanetz / warm/onge/ring
Rodney Nelson / Show and Shadow
Karen Alkalay-Gut / Crossing the River
Patricia Valdata / One-Stop
Sybil Kollar / Mute
Mark Pawlak / 'Infinite Justice'
David Howard / Social Studies
Marcus Bales / Stories Warriors Told Me, #4 - His Face Catches Fire
Jose Padua / The Beautiful Things
Patrick John Green / precipitation defined by radio
John Bradley / A Bag of Fertilizer for the President
Kent Johnson / The Impropriety of the Hours
CL Bledsoe / Tsar Bomba
Joseph Somoza / Vortex
Martha Deed / Willow Branch
Lisa Sewell / The House of Bernarda Alba
Hugh Seidman / Marla Ruzicka
Sheila E. Murphy / Speech Trimmed to a Whisper Anymore
e k rzepka / 'pshed.meshye  
Harris Schiff / The Body Politic
Bobby Byrd / The Little Girl and Jack the Moon Man
Clarinda Harriss / Road Noise
mIEKAL aND / Hysteric Sutra
Jayne Lyn Stahl / Avant-Garden
Rachel Loden / Epitaph
Jorn Ake / Great Pick Up Lines of the Twentieth Century
Paul E. Nelson / Letter 3:05 (In Memoriam Hamed Mowhoush)
Alexander Jorgensen / Shadenfreude
Helen Duberstein / Graduate in 2000
Michael Heller / In Paris
Georgios Tsangaris / "I write on brick walls"
Stephen Vincent / Signals
Michael Maggiotto / On the Afghan Trail
Marthe Reed / Birding Babylon
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino / Poem (Dedication)
Ana Doina / Near active volcanoes
James Scully / Dadalab
Glenn R. McLaughlin / A prayer drawn from Holy war
Ray Craig / insects tear - a poem in pictures

 

  Keith Wilson

fr. Graves Registry, #1

                . . . Wein, leuchtend
                in eisernen Hauben. Wein? Oder
                Blut?—Wer kanns unterscheiden?

                              - Rainer Maria Rilke,
                              The Lay of the Love & Death of Coronet Christopher Rilke

Something is coming.

a significance, growing, emerges
from the deep green water, slick
with oil. At first it shows a low shape,
resembles a shark, or a killer whale:

                          long & dark, with fins.

Nearer the surface, a glow of blue,
a gleam from the cockpit, sense
of someone within–a paleness
viewed through uncertain light.

The increasing apprehension, uneasy
excitement.

It's free. The cables of the straining crane
draw taut & the water opens, parts with suction
& gurgles

                          —the plane, wings shorn off, body
                          intact, is lifted, gleaming, blue,
                          paint freshly wet into the bright
                          sun of Tokyo Bay.

Pilot & gunner sit stiff
in their proper places; radioman
below, can't be seen, the awareness
of him alone is there

                           each has his goggles set, heads
                           leaning slightly forward against
                           the restraining straps. Lenses
                           wink dully.

Then in the vanishing water
in the bright air flesh slides off long dead
skulls, the helmets shrink & collapse
out of sight as the hook drops the TBM, looking
almost new, on the waiting barge.

                           NB: an autopsy revealed
                           the pilot was killed
                           by one piece of shrapnel
                           which neatly severed
                           each vertebra in turn
                           the gunner & the radioman
                           were alive when the plane
                           hit the water.

[fr. Graves Registry and Other Poems: New York, Grove Press, 1967]

 

  Robert Sward

Report from the Front

All over newspapers have stopped appearing,
and combatants everywhere are returning home.
No one knows what is happening.
The generals are on long distance with the President,
surveying the planet from on high.
No one knows even who has died, or how,
or who won last night, anything.
Those in attendance on them may,
for all we know, still be there.

All over newspapers have stopped appearing.
Words once more, more than ever,
have begun to matter. And people are writing
poetry. Opposing regiments, declares a friend,
are refusing evacuation, are engaged instead
in sonnet sequences; though they understand, he says,
the futility of iambics in the modern world.
That they are concerned with the history and meaning
of prosody. That they persist in their exercises
with great humility and reverence.

 

  Rebecca Kavaler

Iphigenia

Eyes soft as a doe's
Facing the hunter's taut bow
Uncomprehending.

She serves a purpose
Greater than herself—don't we
All? I kiss the knife.

They will sing of you
Through the ages, I tell her
And make the first cut.

I stand on the shore
Awash in blood, awaiting
A good wind for Troy.

 

  Harriet Green

Idle Thoughts

It's just as well that soldier was killed far away in Iraq
So that I don't really have the thought of his death
On my mind
While I cover half an onion in clingfilm
For later use
Because I am sure I will be around to use it
Some other time soon
And I am sure I will have the time to worry
About whether I am wearing
Matching underwear
In case I get run over by a bus
Even though I hardly walk anywhere these days
And if I do, it's not where the buses are
But that fear of being run over
With less than perfect underwear
Runs deeper
Than being afraid for the far away soldier
Blown up in khaki vest and shorts and desert kit
While I thread my arms through prettier bra straps
And legs through prettier panties
Making ready to die anytime
As if it were as likely as being blown up in Iraq
As if buses were making ready to aim right at me
While I go shopping for more onions

 

  Tad Richards

October

Past the paint chipped folding
chair with the oil
smeared T shirt
hung over the back
past the gouged rust speckled

wrought iron gate
round the dog
lying indifferent
in the boot rutted path
we come to a

half shut door
what's beyond it is
irrelevant except
for where shadows
overlap

dust and light play tricks
then back along the path
the dog stretches
and follows
the fence gleams fresh paint

the shirt on the chair reads
give peace a chance
on the street
dust is kicking up
and dogs are dispersing

 

  Jennifer Compton

Somewhere in Europe

. . . seven people from three nations are having a near death experience
(by night) on the road from Banja Luka to Sarajevo.
Travelling behind the car with Vukovar plates.
And a lurid orange moon squats on a low hill
as if this landscape is the backdrop to a 14-year-old boy's
bloodthirsty video game.

. . . the wave which is the backwash from a vaporetto laps and laps
and licks and licks at the fissure in the step and a woman looks at
it succeeding like a tongue of slow fire.

. . . a drop of water flings itself up into an arch
above the new Opera House which Charles Dickens never saw.
He died before the bomb fell on the Opera House that he knew.
And the solo pianist with two pianos makes the piano he is playing
reverberate. Like pain, coming at you with two fists and an agenda.

. . . the gypsy squats with her hand thrust out just over the border.
She will take konvertible marks or kuna. With melting eyes
a lamb turns on the spit, a delicious guilty stink, powered by
a pretty rush of water in a channel falling into a pool of trout.
The aboriginal bush, surplus to requirements, looms and swoops.

. . . one of the two or three local whores meets the bus, offering rooms.
That's strange, says the boy. She's not a room lady.

. . . and a man becomes a hologram in a gallery in a famous city.
Until he paid no mind to his audience coming and going
with the elaborate tiptoes, elbows askew,
there was no way of knowing he was not alive in this place.

. . . a herd, a throng, stand on the river bank and stare up
at the bridge.
A herd, a throng, stare at the river, the herd on the bank,
from the bridge.
And a man in red speedos is about to dive, or fly, or is he?

Somewhere in Europe the cemetery is full to the brim
with new graves gleaming, old couples filling vases
at the tap with the precious, transparent water.
The old graves take note of every achievement,
Professor this, Doctor that. With famous sculptures.
And the light bounces off the monumental slab
enough to blind you—like a lid on everything,
a lid of polished tilting smoothness, green and vast.

Somewhere in Europe a young man stands on his balcony
and looks out at the urban trees as the trams glide by
and he looks at his country, his brand new country.
Somewhere in Europe she stands on stage in her silver shoes
in an absolute jewel of a bijou theatre that somehow survived
and reads your poem in a language nobody understands
and is transfixed by how she absolutely wished for this.
Love is always the best gift—although it may be the last gift.

 

  Joel Solonche

Last Night I Had a Dream

Last night I had a dream
that I was drafted. I was in the army.
I wasn't nineteen in my dream.
I was what I am now. I was sixty,
I had a wife, I had a daughter.
I was on a bus with the other
draftees, all sixty-year-old men
with wives and daughters, and all
whose names began with ess.
The bus was full. It was a bus only
for us sixty-year-old men with wives
and daughters and names that began
with ess. We were talking about where
we were going. To Iraq, said one
draftee of sixty with wife and daughter
whose name began with ess. To Afghanistan,
said another draftee of sixty with wife
and daughter whose name began with ess.
No, to South America, I heard, said
another draftee of sixty with wife
and daughter whose name began with ess.
He's right. We're going to invade Venezuela,
said another draftee of sixty with wife
and daughter whose name began with ess.
Yeah, that's what I heard too, to topple
Chavez and get the oil before he gives
it all away to the poor countries,
said
another draftee of sixty with wife and
daughter whose name began with ess.
When I woke up I didn't care who was
right. It didn't mean anything. It didn't
bother me. Why should it? It was a dream.
Unless it wasn't me that I was dreaming
about last night. Unless it was my daughter
I was dreaming about last night. Unless
it was our daughters we were dreaming
about last night.

 

  Chris Mansell

Some Wars Are Silent

some wars are silent
there are no bridges
the mist falls to the ground
and the songs of the missing
have long died    the country
mimes its history the eucalypt
the water the mountain
stand alone    there is
no afternoon where
flesh comes together
where the stories
of the ten thousand years
comes    where the clapstick
sings out    here history
is silent and the wars
are not acknowledged
we are deprived of heroes
fools and lessons    our history
settles on the grass
like an old man sitting down
some wars are silent
and there are no bridges

 

  Steve Dalachinsky

army (for mary jo)

sowing out of time
the duck
a quack if ever
drained of its etoms
a lol ogy gone wild
in these tamed waters

tired from pulling the levers in his sleep
a young swan
beds down for the night
the choice he bet on still
a bet away

each season is out of
place this
grain like the two lips in the movie
tonight that weren't yours

other creatures are fed by the keeper's
hand tho the keeper acts like other creatures
born here to this pond
a LAGOON more like it
unmasked the mask worn as the mask is
worn   frayed about the edges
the ties that bind it to the
skin

within reason   the carbon hark
dying beast & this love
a jagged rock at the edge of water
speaks of extinction as only a "solid" can

army follows army
into the waiting stench
the coming growth
army wading thru feed toward
the SAG -

parm la lazit prasm opti- aut a bout

gone round again &
round a n other cycle
unpleated

 

  Jéanpaul Ferro

The elementary particles

 

  Hugh Fox

Insomnia

"Any spare change?" Cambridge, in Chicago
just sitting there with a sign in their hat,
"Homeless," closing down schools (Lansing),
Silicon plus factory-office Valley "Que puedo
hacer, donde puedo
(wildfire) vivir? / What
can I do, where can I live?" not tourist but
Hapsburg Prague/Buda-Pest . . . inside Lenin's
dreams.

 

  H. Palmer Hall

Mortars with Crow: a prose poem in eight parts

1. He didn't like war, but he knew war wasn't about liking or not liking. He had gone to war for his own reasons. He could no longer remember the reasons. He grew tired of people who always asked his reasons for going to war. War wasn't about reasons. He was not sure what war was really about, but he knew it was not about reasons.

2. He was concerned about the birds. They had stared at him, had seemed to want to talk to him. One black crow had sat on his knee and looked, with his round beady eyes, into his own eyes.

3. He sat on a hill, surrounded by hundreds of men, no women, that's just how things turned out, Sitting on the hill, he heard a thump and then another thump and then a series of quick thumps. After some of the thumps, he heard men screaming. Mostly they were screaming obscenities. And then the thumping sounds stopped.

4. The crow flew away, but had circled his head three times. The crow had not shat upon him, just gave him a look that seemed to mingle disgust with sadness.

5. Mortars, just mortars. No one had looked an enemy in the eye. Glory, he thought, glory. War is glorious. I have sat on a hill and I have been attacked by the enemy and I have survived to fight again. And so, he continued to sit on the hill.

6. The sun rose and he saw dead men and living men, most of the men were among the living, only two were dead. Flies buzzed around the dead ones until a detail of men hauled them away in plastic bags.

7. He drank water from his canteen. He opened a can of rations and ate peaches. He smoked a cigarette. He had not smoked before going to war. He kept his eyes turned out to the perimeter.

8. There was no attack following the mortar attack, only helicopters buzzing around like flies. A crow flew past his eyes.

 

  Louis Armand

Three Testiments to Apollonius

           (for Czeslaw Milosz)

-Non, je ne regrette rien. What was required of me
is what I attempted: simplicity, always
simplicity. When we were children, who was to say
the Argonauts never stood beside the Vistula
preparing a sacrifice to their shrewd gods or scheming
to steal our national myth? We grew up
jealously behind city walls, imagining the erotic
pleasure of creation. The Greeks had raided
everything they could find: the mannerist prosody,
the epic fatalism. Their school-masters
bullied us into becoming poets. We knew what
ethics was and did our duty.

—I always suspected your words which you called
silence. If the future exists, why should it listen
to our private misgivings? our furtive dialogues
with all those we could not love or save? our bad faith
at having been condemned in absentia by what
we could not write? War and occupation were our
normalcy. They bred their own language
that never could become our property, to be stuffed
in a book and goaded from time to time with
sentiment. Our childish gods were officially dead,
exposed to indifference, or sold-off for the sake
of a footnote to History.

—Soon our sweet movie comes to an end. We rise
from the dead again and everything begins,
exactly as it was meant to. It was enough to know
that someone must also have thrown the last stone,
that images do not belong to words, that we
alone know what an horizon is. Life takes its toll.
A mechanical dog laughs and perhaps it is us
it is laughing at. An old grammarian with his
mental puppet show, rehearsing the great show-
trials of the Slavic poets. One by one they are
snuffing out the conjectures; on our heads they are
reconstructing the old borders and checkpoints. Soon
they will not need to prohibit us.

 

  Gay Partington Terry

Backyard Invocation

  On some far mountain, coyotes howl.
From holy towers the faithful are called to prayer.
Ships' bells announce the changing watch.
Valves turn and life comes to neighborhood sprinklers.

  Waking to another realm in whispered prayer.
Hands turn unevenly around the melting watch.
Dream, scheme and plunder how
to turn summer melancholy to exotic call.

  Shadows hunkered beneath trees watch;
birds circle in disbelief at how
change below affects patient air,
and why we lapsed animals maim and kill.

  Do they notice the pray-er who watches
in the garden of sleepy howlonging?

 

  John M. Bennett

                                                       

 

  Paul Howell

A Wall of the Heavenly Palace by Wu Choi

Wu Choi is the artist who chose
Five hundred grains of beach sand
Carved our faces in them and
Flung them out to the sea
For us to find
When we came back as clams.

On the wall he built
Like ancient metopes and friezes
He engraved our wilted crops—
Everything we planned to reap

At the top is the list of dreams
the names of seeds
a history of bad weather
and the causes of despair
In the center victory is justice
On the right a scale
to weigh the value of wishes
and the puppet merchants
who offer them for sale
Women in long dresses and men
without roots, soldiers
who are the mainstay of happiness
They are shown in acts of cruelty along the shore
waiting for boats to rescue them.
They have loved war, but even love is tiring

Near the ground are a file of hearses
embalmed corpses, funeral pyres
gravestones and the lists of succession
These sink slowly into sand
For the rest it is covered with cities
and galloping light with rising smoke
Canals for retreat drain swarms of refugees
who wave the banner of indecipherable meaning

The wall is long and high
Archaeologists have not yet found the other side
and do not know if they are
Inside
Or outside of Heaven.

[Edison Literary Review, Fall, 2003]

 

  Eileen Tabios

Post-Autobiography

If language is impossible, then certain people cannot speak.
Or: certain people need not hear.

It's an old story in the empire's latest wardrobe: scholarship.
The Other of the double-major: accounting (convenient for tenure).

She was told to go to community college instead.
He was told there is no money for a university, "but you got muscles!"

"Talk to the hand."
"Speak to my blog."

He titled his book Concealed In . . .
The ellipsis hides, elides, gives up . . .

From hereon, I deny the exclamation point and question mark.
We are forced to lapse to the in-terro(r)-bang.

 

  Harriet Zinnes

Forming a Word  

  Forming a word—
hesitant, fumbling,
eager, ready to seize its significance,
stumbling into a dictionary of unknowns.

  Forming a word.
Finally assuring its creation.
Gluing it together,
And the word becomes a finality
with syllables, sounds, evocative meaning,
useless alone, but beckoning to be remembered,
to be uttered, to be desired—
to heal the wounds of soldiers, of nations.

 

 

  Philip Metres

One more story he said In a restaurant in Amsterdam

a young woman came in
speaking Arabic I said are you Iraqi
she said I haven't eaten for three days
I said what do you mean   she
said
I need to turn   turn myself in
this was a strange language to me
a different logic   Come and sit I said
food brought out   she ate   finally
spoke   her husband now in Istanbul
they'd escaped Iraq he was taxi driver
sold his car paid $5,000 to Turkish driver
to send her   Istanbul to Amsterdam
a big truck   crates of fruit and vegetables
had a tiny space   in the middle kept her
there  gave her food and water supposed to last
seven days   lasted four strange language
mouth of the truck   she was stuck
in one position for seven days could not
move  crates of figs  pallets cracked
blocked   lodged then they just dropped her
in the middle of Amsterdam right then she was
hoping waiting   turn myself in my husband not
far behind   strange language to me I did not
understand  turn myself in in the middle
of Amsterdam do you speak       speak

 

  Ruth Lepson

Reading Joseph Brodsky on the Treadmill

His new life, war, and Ceres—silly, I think,
dismiss him, walk, walk, walk, walk—
white stucco walls, war, and nothing—
then he captures my attention again,
still, I start jogging, as hard bodies surround me.
When I slow down, which is soon—
"Things are, in turn, the leeches of thought"
I repeat, repeat, memorize,
summon a poem by Jorie Graham
I read last month in the doctor's office—
she was feeling like nothing, in a hotel room,
in the night's middle, as I felt recently:
ears stuffed up, menopause sneaking in.
living alone—what to attribute what to.
Anyway, now I'm immersed in Brodsky's
poem in The New Yorker in my yuppie club,
but because I go on to the Keiser machines,
pressurized air pushing against my muscles,
I don't finish his poem,
can't tell what he meant.
These hard bodies, the opposite of my mother,
whom the Vallerand man who sprayed my house
for carpenter ants remembered from two years ago.
Everyone remembers my mother, in a hard body
world, what will I do when she dies, remember
my Lithuanian Jewish emotional mother.

 

  Edward Field

What Poetry Is For

              in homage to Ernesto Cardenal

Back in the sixties when a Nicaraguan poet
came to the Poetry Center and read his poems
about the United Fruit Company with the help of the U.S. government
robbing his people and terrorizing with death squads,
most of the audience of poetry lovers walked out.
I was there, I saw it—
they just didn't want to listen.

Or were brainwashed.
They were probably scared because he was a communist
and they'd be accused of being subversives,
so it was safer not to listen
to what we were doing in Latin America,
practice for what we're doing a hundred times over
in half the world today.

But his poetry, spoken out of the anguish in his heart,
was trying to make us hear—
even if the truth is ugly.
And dangerous.

It was also beautiful
that he told us, flat out, in the simple language of truth,
what we were doing to his country.

Now, too, what else for a poet to write about
except the devastation and misery
our so-called democratic country is causing,
not only at home, with a government turning the economy
into a grab bag for the wealthy,

but abroad, where we've become the Evil Empire,
sending pirate armies to the ends of the earth
to take over governments, seize their assets and control markets,
leaving anarchy behind us,
creating hatred wherever we go, and dangerous enemies
who can fly planes with breathtaking accuracy
into our arrogant towers,
who devote themselves to wrecking our lives
as we've wrecked theirs.

One poet I know is saying it plainly like the Nicaraguan did.
Richard Vargas in Albuquerque writes about the war in Iraq,
". . . we're going to be paying for this for a long time
probably way past my lifetime. 
we've screwed generations to come,"
(here he's talking about the soaring national debt)
"and i wouldn't be surprised
if they let us starve in the streets in our old age. . . ."

That's how poets should be writing in this critical time.
And about the pathology of our leaders
who call everyone who opposes them a terrorist,
even if the cause is just—people fighting against
the occupiers of their lands, against our armies of corporate greed.

And if any of us says No! No more of this!,
we're reminded of their awesome power—
"if you're not with us you're against us."
We know what that means—
there's a Guantánamo Bay in our future.

Vargas, my poet friend, says the most important thing right now.
"if we elect [that chickenshit] bush again the world community
will shun us for the fucking idiots we are."

But how to get rid of this gang
if the voting machines are rigged?

And why aren't more poets shouting from the rooftops?
Or at least from the stages of all the Poetry Centers?

As a British diplomat said, "If this continues
all we can look forward to is unending war."

The stark reality. The warning. What a poet's for.

[from After the Fall: Poems Old and New, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007, by permission of the author]

 

  Susan Donnelly

After Fallujah

I. Profile

At first I don't understand
what those stipples are
on the face and arms
of the young man
who lies on a street there
beside a scarred house wall.
In the background, red flowers
enjoy the sun, no matter who dies.
His profile is beautiful,
the eyes half open, turning to liquid.
It gives him a dreamy look.
His beard is newly trimmed.
And those dots, I see now,
are not a fault in the image,
but flies, all over him.
If you came around the corner
past those oblivious flowers,
you would hear him hum.

II. Shock

What a fine red cloth
the medic has draped
over his arm like a waiter,
as he clears the cot
of one wounded Marine
to make way for another.
Blood rich as paint
on the soaked sheet,
like the tide out of me,
five days from childbirth.
We had no more towels,
a baby cried somewhere,
the doctor leaned over,
his fingers on my wrist.
But I lay like that soldier,
in a field in Maytime,
daisies and bees around me,
not a care in this world.

III. Iraq Burial

These figures stand the way we
humans do always,
one covering his face,
another looking to heaven.
But it is the gesture of the third,
perhaps a brother,
who has placed his open palm,
protective, firm,
on the chest of a dead man
there    you can go now
that makes me, miles away
and in the wrong country,
cover my face with my hands.

 

  Neil Nelson

"I am the Guard"

Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you . . .

Go, painful for-
ever, filled with
misery, poets;
turn, seek back
not sun or stars,

in pit-shit Dis
for all eternity
yr thrust;
so, sightless
yr days are

always, The
Lord our God
has turned His
back to you—
You stay in Hell.

 

  Larissa Shmailo

Exorcism 1992

I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground

I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground

In Serbia a woman
calls her youngest son to her. 
She tells him to sit down.
She will now explain to him
why his father has seemed cold
harsh and cruel to him sometimes.
She tells him of his life.

When his father was a young
boy at the time of World War II,
He was captured by the Germans
under guard at the rail station.
He watched unarmed men and women
emerge slowly from a boxcar.
At the head of the ramp
was a strong commanding figure
in the black uniform of the SS Medical Corp.

He is singing Meistersinger as
the people search for loved ones,
for their children and their parents.
German soldiers beat the people
as they run before the guns.
The SS officer shouts in
a commanding baritone voice:

             "Freeze. Listen. Do as I say."

One very, very old
man, perhaps eighty years old,
scholarly old man
who has fallen to the ground,
his clothes are caked with mud
and his glasses are askew.

A woman crawls up next to him
as if she knew him well.
He turns to her and says, 
   "God. . . .perhaps the man. . .
   In the black uniform. . .
   the imposing man in the    black uniform—maybe
   they sent him to save us?"

The officer is singing
as he points to the left,
to the right and the left:
And the prisoners are herded
to the gates of a camp.
And the young Yugoslav
watched the people
as they marched,
as they hurried to the camps
where they would die.

And the mother turned around
and she said to her son
in a voice he'd never heard
his mother use to him before.
She said, your father learned that
day what I will tell to you right now:

         "It is better to be a Nazi and survive,
          It is better to be a Nazi and survive,
          It is better to be a Nazi and survive,
          than one of those people so helpless and naïve
          that they have no choice but to pray to their God
          that the Nazis will save them from harm."

The boy he was well-trained.

I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.
I stand on holy ground.

(Yugoslavia, 1992. Adapted from Carl Goldberg, Speaking with the Devil: Dialogues with Evil).

 

  Hal Sirowitz

The 'V' That Changed

During World War Two
I grew a Victory Garden, she said.
I tried making it in the shape
of a 'V,' but the cucumbers
grew wild. Unfortunately,
I planted them on the bottom,
which made my 'V' look
like a 'U.' I felt bad for
the soldiers. They were
risking their lives defending
my right to live in a democracy.
and it looked like one of their
most ardent supporters hadn't
learned her letters.

 

  Laura Lentz

Another Poem About the War

In his sleep the missing leg struggles
to break free of the wreckage,
still swimming to the surface
of the muddy swamp.

At the tree line she was standing
there, that toothless smile,
her automatic weapon hidden
under her blue and white skirt.

By the time the helicopters came
she was his mother, and later,
when the nurse gave him the
first injection she was his sister,

her face still dirty from the mud cakes
they slung at each other
after the thunderstorm
that killed the sheriff's son.

At home there is a baby
waiting, and a wife.     At home
Aunt Cecile hangs the laundry
and his father removes a rusted hinge
from the barnyard door.

 

  Jeffrey Beam

The Other

When the spirits come out of a fleshy tunic that is a dead body
(said Belibaste, one of the villagers interrogated), they run very
fast for they are fearful. They run so fast that if a spirit came
out of a dead body in Valencia and had to go into another living
body in the Comte de Foix, if it was raining hard scarcely
three drops of rain would touch it! Running like this, the terrified
spirit hurls itself into the first hole it finds free! In other words into
the womb of some animal which has just conceived an embryo
not yet supplied with a soul; whether a bitch, a female rabbit
or a mare. Or even in the womb of a woman.
                    —The New Yorker

After this we start back alone
sure that the spirit has begun
its wandering
                     wondering where
     on this bleak night
                               after this
          after stars have fallen
          and the spirit of this place
          has forsaken its habitual tunic.

The spirit runs fast
                                        fearful
      runs fast
                          quaking at the strangeness
                                                                      without
      scarcely touched by
                                         the niagara soaking
                                         its flimsy loins.
What, to die?
               This? Hurry, fast
      Oh, I am terrified!

                                                  hurling
                     itself at the first free embryo
      into a new name
                                             and conception.

      I cannot bear the space
                                                       the wideness amazing
                                    in its vacuum—
                          take me into a body.

                                                        And the sleeve
      drops down quick over
                                                     the buzzing centrifuge
                          found.

In the town
                         under steel-blue moans
                         the fire's warmth
                         the newly welcomed
                         in sweet linen rolls

        while candles are lit
        for the dear
                                    departed.

 

  Frank Parker

Tombstone

My daughter enters
the room and finds me

on the edge of my bed

What can be funnier
than this, she said

I'm not ready for school

2.
when I slide into the blue car
bleeding wires
where Sachdev's flute used to sing

3.
the edge of a hole
an old man's hair

my father asking questions
making me shake

his life in a box?

4.
prison
walls
the wind

exits
all covered

in time

5.
the tide
sunrise in our eyes

we lean out and look upon
shiny black roads bordering the sand

6.
There are hills trees roads and townships
gossip is time loving the visit, thinking
                                                       —all

7.
someone coughs

bring the hoe inside

door locks

4:30 in the morning

8.

             charlie parker rides with a farmhand?          
                           ...voxxi

David tells me about song

I read Paul Blackburn

"hands move earth
feeling earth"

moment to moment
to monument in time
blue and polished stone

9.

The Morning Sun

I've been a mean son of a bitch
and I'm sorry

10.

Epilogue

what wind blows the Mexican Palo Verde
the cactus wren

my footsteps confess
no special talent

one sneaker follows the other
into a brilliant make believe I know I know

Mother Father Sun and Moon
Hi O Silver and Away

 

  Alan Sondheim

i meditate upon the ten directions /
i meditate upon the ten intermediate directions
and the breathing of the winds /
i meditate upon the breathing out and breathing in /
i meditate upon the four winds /
i meditate upon the five winds /
i meditate upon all living beings /
i meditate upon all dead beings /
upon all ghosts /
upon all gatherings /
i meditate upon all gatherings and all filterings /
i meditate upon red dusts /
i meditate upon yellow blue white red dusts /
i meditate upon all radiations and all swarming /
i meditate upon all avatars and sheave-bodies /
i meditate upon the hundred worlds /
the thousand worlds /
i meditate upon worldings and world-destroyings /
i meditate upon world-destroyers and the dusts of
world-destroyers /
i meditate upon all languagings and wordings /
i meditate upon all words /
i meditate upon thunderbolts and daggers /
i meditate upon echoes of thunderbolts corrosions
of daggers /
i meditate upon rusts and skulls /
i meditate upon the bones of broken skulls /
upon the dusts of bones /
upon the radiations of bones /
i meditate upon memories and structures of
memories /
and upon the broken structures of memories /
and upon forgotten structures of forgotten
memories /
i meditate upon the smallest and largest and the
tears and deaths of the smallest and largest /
i meditate upon the dependent originations of
everything and nothing /
upon the co-dependent originations of everything
and nothing /
upon the co-dependent co-originations of
everything and nothing /
i meditate upon nothing and everything /
i meditate upon nothing at all /
upon the emptiness of radiations and gatherings /
upon the emptiness of dusts and filterings /
upon the sheave-beings and the emptiness of
sheave-beings /
and upon the emptiness of skins emptiness of
bones emptiness of thunderbolts and daggers /
i meditate upon no-meditation /
i meditate upon emptiness of emptiness /
i meditate upon naming and namings /
upon general naming and improper naming /
upon proper names and proprietaries /
upon parts of speech and signal parts of speech /
i meditate upon protocols and the gatherings
of bones /
upon the coming-together of bones /
upon the dissolution of red white blue yellow
dusts /
upon the dissolution of red dusts and
filterings /
i meditate upon the hardening of gatherings /
i meditate upon the disappearance of filterings /
and the hardening of worlding and worlds /
and the hardening of this world and earth /
i meditate upon the organisms and life-forms of
this earth /
i meditate upon the thinging and being of this
earth /
upon the beings of this earth /
upon this being of this earth and this being /
upon the bones of this being /
upon the minding and minds of these bones /
upon the meditation of these bones /
upon the meditation of these bones and the ten
directions /
i meditate upon the ten directions /
i meditate upon the ten intermediate directions
and the breathing of the winds /
meditate upon the breathing out and breathing in /
upon the four winds /
upon the five winds / meditate upon all living beings /
meditate upon all dead beings /
upon all ghosts /
upon all gatherings /
meditate upon all gatherings and all filterings /
meditate upon red dusts /
meditate upon yellow blue white red dusts /
meditate upon all radiations and all swarming /
meditate upon all avatars and sheave-bodies /
meditate upon the hundred worlds /
the thousand worlds /
meditate upon worldings and world-destroyings /
meditate upon world-destroyers and the dusts of
world-destroyers /
meditate upon all languagings and wordings /
meditate upon all words /
meditate upon thunderbolts and daggers /
meditate upon echoes of thunderbolts corrosions
of daggers /
meditate upon rusts and skulls /
meditate upon the bones of broken skulls /
upon the dusts of bones /
upon the radiations of bones /
meditate upon memories and structures of
memories /
and upon the broken structures of memories /
and upon forgotten structures of forgotten
memories /
meditate upon the smallest and largest and the
tears and deaths of the smallest and largest /
meditate upon the dependent originations of
everything and nothing /
upon the co-dependent originations of everything
and nothing /
upon the co-dependent co-originations of
everything and nothing /
meditate upon nothing and everything /
meditate upon nothing at all /
upon the emptiness of radiations and gatherings /
upon the emptiness of dusts and filterings /
upon the sheave-beings and the emptiness of
sheave-beings /
and upon the emptiness of skins emptiness of
bones emptiness of thunderbolts and daggers /
meditate upon no-meditation /
meditate upon emptiness of emptiness /
upon nothing at all /
upon the emptiness of radiations and gatherings /
upon the emptiness of dusts and filterings /
upon the sheave-beings and the emptiness of
sheave-beings /
upon the emptiness of skins emptiness of
bones emptiness of thunderbolts and daggers /
upon no-meditation /
upon emptiness of emptiness /
nothing at all /
emptiness of radiations and gatherings /
emptiness of dusts and filterings /
sheave-beings /
skins bones thunderbolts daggers /
no-meditation /
no emptiness of emptiness /
no emptiness /

 

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