war poems/essays
Send to PoetsLane@everestkc.net
(lyrics 'what the hell are we fightin' for' taken from I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag, by Country Joe & The Fish,
an unofficial anthem of the anti-war people during the Viet Nam War)
"[Poetry] merely speaks to the soul, so the soul can remember.
So it's quite proper to have all the poems against the war.
And it's proper not to be disappointed if nothing changes."
--Robert Bly
"Pity the nation whose people are
sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The Terror Is Us
Itsy Bitsy, Iran Scare
What a pleasant surprise,
Today I received a note
From a young Iranian poet
Who liked my poems
Maybe his leaders aren’t so serious
About wiping my family off the map
Maybe he doesn’t agree
With the atomic build up
Or a Third World War
Maybe the bellicose
Threats are only
For ammunition cartels
And all the rest is idle talk,
Perhaps I can breathe easily
And the Chamberlians are
Right this time and
There are no eleven thousand
Rockets aimed at me
The Chinese and Indians
Have made wonderful industrial leaps
And aren’t threatening
The use of Atomic weaponry
Ah but they have A Bombs
So what’s the problem
Iran feels insecure
So let them have a tiny
Itsy bitsy bomb of their own
What was that ,
You say they are irresponsible
And threaten war
Well, it comes from feeling insecure
So, why are we discriminating
Against them
Eventually all the countries
In the world will have
Their own itzy bitzy tiny
Bomb to blow us all to bits
Shimon Weinroth
Rapunzel Akbar
Long hair hip hop Kabul reports
Jail for lewdly selling ice cream to girlsHomeland Security is a comic book serial
Not yet a graphic novel based on a screenplayThe top of the hour is the bottom of the barrel on this Fourth of July
The news is on repeat and I feel like a foolMinimum wages are rising across
Car bombs are multiplying acrossGas lines in the Levant
She mouthlessly pleads for fuelThe whole planet watches Jerry Springer and Maury Povich
On satellite TV and sympathizes with the Taliban"Holiday in Cambodia" is or is not a gap-fill
Sing-along around the barrel-fire folk songNicholas Karavatos
originally published:Blackbox – a record of the crash (Summer Collisions, 2007)
http://www.williamjamesaustin.com/rapunzel_akbar.html
FOR CINDY SHEEHAN
(written in May 2007)
When Cindy Sheehan announced her retirement
from anti-Iraq War protest,
some wiseass on USENET
compared her to Gilda Radner’s Emily Littella character.
“Oh, Never Mind,” the snarkster said at the end of his post.
You can fight the good fight as long as you can
and ignore the mockery of the people who don’t know
and don’t want to know about what’s going on in Iraq.
It’s not for them to question the deaths of their sons
and daughters and the sons and daughters of their neighbors.
Instead, they see this war as no different from the others:
if the Commander in Chief says the war is just,
then he’s absolutely right.
But what can you do when the Democratic legislators in Washington--
people who do know what’s going on in Iraq—
decide that their November mandate (from the voters) is irrelevant
and that they can’t appear “weak” in front of
the people who don’t know and don’t want to know?
So you go home.
And you wonder how many—or how few---
will dare to risk ridicule and arrest
and take your place
on the frontlines of the symbolic battle
still taking place outside the Western White House
in Crawford, Texas.
Terry McCarty
A Nation of Athenians & Spartans
This nation,
conceived in war,
has always kept it ready.
A solution of
last resort.
Our Athenians want peace
So, our Spartans
prepare for war.
The worst nightmare
of the former,
war,
the height in glory
of the latter.
Our Athenians
scream peace,
at all costs.
Our enemies sense weakness
and attack.
Our Spartans go
to war.
The Athenians
declare
that’s wrong,
we should be
more diplomatic!
The Spartans respond,
that’s the way
its gotta be,
it’s all they understand.
In this nation of
Athenians & Spartans,
is war ever entirely right,
or entirely wrong.
Buck Buchan July-August 2007
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A State of Fear
Keep them in a
State of Fear,
and politically correct.
Shock them with
Global Warming
That they’ll cook or drown
in about a hundred years.
Remind them nightly
of crime and terrorism.
But, let’s get rid of that
nasty Second Amendment.
And, for those who
would protest, complain
or not quite agree,
throw out the first
along with the second.
What has happened to
Lincoln’s nation
of the people,
by the people,
for the people?
This poem was inspired by a novel by Michael Crichton, State of Fear, Harper Collins, 2004
Buck Buchan Aug. 2007
Let me fall like a flower pedal
May enemy bombs be directed at me, and enemy shells
Mark me their target.
shirley cooper-losak 8/10/07
Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo Bay
You can’t unring the bell, he admonished,
meaning 1948, Israel.
So all these bells are ringing, Nazi, Kamakazi
waves out into the universe forever
and I have seen you, as you were never meant
to be seen.
Anyone who peers into the face of God
dies, that was my girlhood religion. Now
I’m made a war criminal. You can’t
unring the bell. I am complicit with this front page.
So what do I do, O male,
having seen beautiful you?
Apologies, apologies
How dare I say such? But beautiful yes, your faces beaten
but not beyond recognition.
Am I to turn away and say I didn’t see you naked and bound together
your tortured, living flesh?
Am I to say tears didn’t well for seeing the beautiful boy, beautiful
son, beautiful father, beautiful brother, beautiful husband. Beautiful
lover, am I to say I didn’t see
God?
I kiss the torture my words cause, this humiliation
I swallow, this violation your God
will further punish you for, strike me dead on the spot, this
is why this is happening to you, my fault.
I kiss you anyway. I love you. I run my hands down all of you, veil
against our depravity, against our God doing this
to your God, a prayer
that you aren’t further pissed on
in the shower. This is not sexual torture
no matter what is said.
I cannot leave you
on the water board, your
broken knees I go down to
sorry
sorry
the electrodes on your genitals, this is not
to arouse you against your manhood
but to drink our bleach and acid water forced down you
now toxic waves forever, my mother’s son, my sister’s
boy, my children’s grandfather, my
lost soulmate, my Ishmael, my Israel, your decapitated
head rolling away, our grandson
packed in ice, nameless
in a secret prison
O Holy Holy I step through
all our Gods
I know who you are
I know what my country is
I kiss you alive, I do not die
I make you again in my body
I give you my breast, warm sweet milk, I kiss the bruises, the burns, drilled holes, cable rapes, castrations, broken femurs, stretched spines, crucifixions.
I take the blindfold off
O Holy Face
I recognize
I do not die
O Holy Body
I pray this past our violation of All,
a bell ringing forever too
***
Sharon Doubiago
What are We Fighting For? (CRAPitalism)
We fight because we were told to fight for our rights.
We fight when someone else steps on our squash plant and we have to retaliate and step on their squash even harder, and preemptively step on all squash plants all around the globe.
We fight because Dick Cheney needs the oil in Iraq to solve his Secret Energy Policy deals so they plot out the oil reserves in Iraq and Cheney has the intelligence twisted so that his marionette Bush leads this gullible country to believe that Iraq is the enemy not Afghanistan where Osama is still able to hide in a cave and save his butt from anyone brighter than a gopher.
And that's The Preferred Intelligence (TPI).
We fight because the Republicans have misled the US for 7 years and the Democrats haven't gotten the will or the brains to decipher trains from cranes and Social Security is still a mess and our borders are as porous as open melons in the hot August sun.
But we need the illegals to be available to pick them.
So the problem becomes the solution.
Brilliant but keep the prices low. Maybe we could grow melons offshore in China and we could pay the freight and buy them cheaper, like pet food and toothpaste, uninspected, now there's a CRAPitalist opportunity...
If you want to have a good time, get elected to Congress and chase a prostitute in Florida, or leak the identity of a covert agent to your pals in the press and do it from a White House telephone.
Bush will back you 'til there are no more corners in the White House to hide in.
If in doubt as to a strategy hire Karl Rove to divide the nation into warring factions, then solicit some good pseudo-Christians to back your attack on gays, flag-burners, or the imagined threat on conventional marriages...anything to divert attention from either Global Warming or the price of ethanol in Venezuela, where apparently no one is dependent on foreign oil.
Good luck, I'm gonna go read my Darwin again and see if the White House really is related to baboons originating from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or the Promised Land.
©Peter Bray, 7/14/07 All rights reserved
JACKBOOTS
Faintly,
almost beyond hearing, behind my mind,
Jack Boots crack on bloody wet cobbles.
Dreams flicker;
strobe-light strokes of scissor-legging Goose steps
slice my sleep.
Gas hisses in Europe (are life sized death ovens warming)?
The Uzi's rasp tattoos mocking holocaust dreams
for the parents of its makers.
And my children, my own flesh?
They know babies are dying.
They know untainted, unstained, un-sinned children are being
ground and spaded into red-mud unmarked raw-earth graves;
they know trumpeting dogmas can not justify.
They're sad, and frightened, and they feel;
but it does not come to them as
ancient, virulent, consuming, ...and familiar.
It's war, and death, and horror, but they see human plays....
They do not see festering pus spilling from
corroded seams of history.
They do not see the rotting corpse
wrapped within the glory shroud.
The timeless succubus poses as today.
But if they survive enough carnage,
one day they, too, will taste the bile of recognition.
The foul dark beast within us wakes,
is unchained...
and among us walks.
(C) Jim Lyle 1993
THE NEW PATRIOTS
They are taking my patriotism
I flinch when expected to recite the Pledge of Allegiance;
I close my mouth when it comes to "under God"
The people who impose this travesty
insist I subject myself to the vision of our Founding Fathers.
Then, they freely change, rewrite, re-explain and corrupt
the very documents to which they refer.
They steal my Patriotism with punitive poison and prejudice.
Lake County cowboys fly enormous flags from 4X4 posts
wired into the rear of their Pick-ups.
They proudly fly them in the rain, never take them down at sundown,
and do not retire them when they fray.
If I display my flag, am I assumed at one with them?
They steal territory in my patriotism.
Many have never served on a Jury, donated time for civic endeavor,
or contributed or worked for charity.
Some are criminals even as they absorb entitlements and avoid taxes.
They beat their drums, yet they, themselves, do not rush to serve.
Few have ever invested in that solitary social gift called "Art".
Yet their preaching corrodes and defines and sculpts my Patriotism.
I have an ex-friend who made a lot of money in this country
He lives in Mexico to avoid U.S. income tax,
but he beats his patriotic drum, and
you and I help; our taxes finance his touristic patriotism.
Another proud conservative cheers the erosion of civil rights.
Says everyone should be monitored, says he has nothing to fear.
He doesn't realize that a government which could outlaw Islam,
might also outlaw Democracy; "a small cost for security", he says.
And controls for the "legal individuals" we call Corporations?
"Unnecessary", he assures, "they are never evil and lawless
unless and until government cripples them with control".
These things poach, pinch, and parse portions of my patriotism.
With that which remains… I refuse to participate.
I deny and defy such patriotism;
it's the most patriotic thing I can do.
© Jim Lyle Sept 11 02
Mythologies
October Muse
By Hal Zina Bennett
I
I won't write
poems of war,
except to praise:
Help me celebrate
grief--an unclaimed
open hand, a prayer
as it is shoveled
tenderly into the
wheeled collecting box.
Visioning his father,
dead eighteen years,
stroke at eighty seven,
the shoveler pauses,
notes a photo
of a child, maybe
two or three years old,
picks it up,
dusts off the ashes,
slips it into his
breast pocket,
then ponders the
speed that shrapnel
changes the world;
he checks his latex
gloves and, satisfied,
lifts a naked leg
he has found
into a translucent
bag, grotesquely
overlarge for this
single member,
however precious,
then zippers up.
II
He remembers
his childhood
at sixteen,
the flameout
of a jet fighter
a mile from his home.
First to the crash site,
he saw the hill
covered in snow,
steam rising,
no smoke. On the
hillside an oak tree
silhouetted against
the starlit sky,
and resting in the
low branches, as if
carefully set there,
not to be forgotten,
the pilot's helmet,
intact except for the
chin strap torn free.
That boy had never
imagined how a
fighter plane could
come apart. Pieces
so small! Or how
the force could
render muscle and
bone so clean. With
jagged edges the
metal still lay in the
pasture next summer
where cows grazed,
as if burned metal
were intended there,
like the trees
catching moonlight
that still night.
III
And so I wondered,
where have we ever
lived without weapons,
without the aggrieved
hearts, without
so suddenly our tears.
We are everywhere
coming together
mostly in times of
great fear, great loss,
discovering we can
embrace strangers
and find ourselves.
So I praise war,
for only here can we
remember that, put up
against these horrors,
our beliefs fade away
and love rises with
the smoke of finality. ~
Hal Zina Bennett
Deserter
Spine-sagged figures trudge
where mottled hill smacks a smoky sky.
A breeze lifts arms but pushes phantom weights,
crosses the shape of forebodings. I plead for coddling. But
gray huddle bursts—those petulant wings derisive of my
intrusion, message on repulsive eyes. I recoil
faceless among faces.
Had I feathers not sticks to heave
survival arms uphill in desert cubicles, where
suns sketch moons over trees. Had I beaks
not lips to warble jeweled clips not
statements of commitments without weight or
facets I could hold out to to some light
or undecided darkness.
Spirit-less I creep up a clump of cypresses those
grave sentinels that now stir: Am I perhaps
who gave up fighting, scrambling to my end where
martinet on my deserter’s trail awaits? Hinted stars
witness my trembling, and then my calming—on my head
twitters drip peace notes, congealing. I turn
balancing my concrete sky.
Alegria Imperial
Vancouver, BC
Here are three war poems submitted by me Michele F. Cooper--thanks for considering my work. I've written a lot about war. One of my poems was a finalist in the 2004 War Poems Competition, and two were published in Poems for the Iraqi People, and two on New Verse News. //Best wishes on the new page, Michele
Shell-Shock
Wallpaper has to bear up as the
words hit the ribboned flowers
once, twice per second, faster
than his breath breathing urgency,
great urgency, urgency greater
than a rifle hitting a city wall
every foot, bam, bam, bam,
she’s in a small closed room
off the kitchen, taking shelter
from his fit and where she
always hopes to work at home.
She counts up the onslaughts
she’s storing, the increasing
spaces between whomps as
the words hit the walls. Liar!
Cheat! Money! Never loved me!
But it’ll be over soon.
Breathing will start. It has to.
She is tired, ears clogged with
cotton from taking it in so often.
She doesn’t feel with him, not
since he punched through the
wall so’s he wouldn’t slam her,
then fell to the beige linoleum
holding his fist
like a bruised and bleeding puppy
close to his chest where the pump
makes heat, beats it way
into the next minutes and the next.
Ka-boom, boom, ka-boom, ka-boom.
He’s a wounded soldier, back
from the war in a chair for ten
months, still thanks the lord he
can walk after that, never mind
the headaches and blow-ups.
In the dark of night he weeps
and prays, punches the pillow
and swears to get it together
before Lila leaves for good,
she’s back for now, thank god,
loves enough to keep trying,
even for the last and only
final try, she said, if it doesn’t fly
by Christmas, she’s out,
aspirin and valium half-gone already,
he knows it, the way she leaves
those clipped morning notes
and hardly eats, holds her head back
to watch him, watch his mouth
and arms when he says anything
more than a word or two.
Tennessee Homecoming
Outside the cabin, stripes of shadow
crosshatch the log walls,
loose bark curling and dropping
too often for sweeping.
She’s on the porch, peeling white potatoes
for dinner, and he’s coming at six,
having given up on Baghdad,
bomber’s life taking down his health.
He wants air after the fuselage stink
of his F-16, and she’s peeling and putting
the holes aside and hearing the rocker creak,
dents on the pillow, warm nights.
She cuts the potatoes in fours,
drops their pale white flesh
in the boiling water, adds salt and pepper,
hugs herself against a sudden chill.
She’s jealous of her own peace
from yesterday, but has to work through
the chicken and cabbage and peas
and sprouts, and she’s baked
a pie for dessert, apple,
his favorite, her signature.
Memorial Day
1
The radio’s too loud, static
and explosions at 6 and 11,
counting the losses at midnight,
approval ratings up and down
the body politic, e-mails blinking
till the message leaks all over
and no excuse for not knowing.
It didn’t used to be this way;
we chose our enemies from lists,
marked our territory,
our bills, budgets, and bunglings,
warning our moms to watch out,
our sisters, our children,
as the smiling trumpets passed,
the floats, the long batons.
You think it’s only the Jews
in long beards and yarmulkes,
Islam's looking out
from under their folded scarves
with daggers to their heads
and midriffs?
We’re sleeping with enemies
in our mortgaged homes;
uncles and brothers leave
the table sulking, plates half full
with franks and slaw;
they could kill us for saying no.
2
The bunting, the uniforms,
gold buttons saluting the crowds,
fire-cracking rifles scaring the kids,
fragments of red and blue alerts
racing from brass to brass,
drums and trumpets puncturing
the good will of pacifists
as their families form committees,
inform and reform arrangements
with grandmas and school pals
for the cellar cot or second couch;
the trial’s coming in four days,
news clips on treason still playing out
over black light and sickly green
though it’s only for now, they say,
while the war’s on.
Michele Cooper
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Tom Goff
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Reruns
Carol Alena Aronoff, Ph.D., psychologist and writer, guided a Buddhist Meditation center, taught Eastern spirituality and healing practices at San Francisco State, led Healing in Nature retreats in Hawaii and Arizona and worked as a counselor in Marin County for many years. She co-authored Practical Buddhism: The Kagyu Path, published Compassionate Healing: Eastern Perspectives. Her poems have appeared in Comstock Review, Potpourri, Poetic Realm, Poetica, Mindprints, Dream Fantasy International, Beginnings, Hawaii Island Journal, In Our Own Words, Theater of the Mind, Animals in Poetry, From the Web, Heartlodge, Tiger's Eye, Sendero, Buckle&, Iodine, Asphodel, Tiger 's Eye, Nomad's Choir, and Out of Line. She received a prize in the Common Ground spiritual poetry contest and is a current Pushcart Prize nominee. She won the Tiger's Eye blog contest on the writing life and has participated three times in Braided Lives, a collaboration of artists and poets. Her chapbook, Cornsilk, was published by Indian Heritage Council in 2004; her illustrated poetry book, The Nature of Music, and an expanded, illustrated Cornsilk were published by Pelican Pond in 2006. Her Soup Made the Moon Weep was published in 2007.
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