1.
I laughed when I told my friend:
Saddam is writing poems!
No matter how down and out you are, there’s always
poetry! I snorted.
When the last rotten plank
in the basement of your mind has fallen through,
pray that a thin lifeline of words may sustain you.
I feel ashamed now, thinking about it,
and fascinated. Is Saddam writing in rhyme or blank verse?
Does he prefer narrative epics? And is he any good?
2.
I heard the mass graves, when dug up, were overrun
with relatives, searching among
ten-year-old decayed corpses
for an arm, a leg, a thumb —
something that had once been wife or brother or son.
I hear there are not enough guards to keep the families out,
the battalions of grief
with their numberless riders.
3.
Maybe Saddam really loves poetry.
Hitler loved music.
Nero probably loved something as well — elephants,
or dancing girls,
or boys.
4.
He lived in a cave for months.
That gives a man time
to get to know some ghosts.
Death must have smelled familiar
to him; he must have recognized and then ignored
its stench on his hair, his clothes.
5.
Large-scale killing numbs the mind.
Everything’s a question of scale.
For instance, I’ve heard that great blue whales can weigh
two hundred tons. Two hundred tons!
Hardly imaginable.
Our brains aren’t built
to think on that scale,
any more than one gnat
in a cloud of gnats
buzzing around a redwood
can comprehend the full dimensions of the giant tree.
6.
Forget Saddam. Imagine for one moment
all the work-roughened hands
that have picked your food and sewn your clothes
and kept you alive since day one.
When we die, will there be a reckoning
of what and whom we’ve used
to pay for our lives, and how,
and will lack of imagination be allowed as an excuse?
7.
On the one hand, poetry is entirely worthless when weighed
against the fact of dying oceans,
or hungry children.
On the other hand, who
actually travels to the bottom of the ocean with a scale
to weigh the great blue whale
if not some fool of a poet?
8.
I know, I know,
it’s all extrapolated from a jawbone.
And so are all the great stories, all the best poems.
9.
Most poetry is bullshit, of course.
But if a slender line of truth
could reach to the bottom of the ocean,
and snag a great blue whale in its delicate noose,
and haul her up so we could feel, just for a second, her smooth enormity —
could we understand it then? And would it change us?
Tag: history
“Interesting Times,” Fergus Allen
When the pestilence had left Newcastle
We sent in the prisoners of war
As an advance guard to clear the rats
And burn their carcasses on waste land
Between the town and the hills to the north.
And to these dry hills we then dispatched
The prisoners, giving them their freedom.
It is not known how many survived
Or what caused the deaths of those who perished.
The burial of our own dead we left
To the old people, arguing fairly
That they had an abundance of memories
And must possess a kind of immunity
To have lived so gradely and so long.
But after the carting and interment
In mass graves, they were required to camp
For six weeks outside the eastern gate.
We were pleased to see how many returned.
The rest of us, except for the wounded,
Small children and women at full term,
Sweated for days on the muddy bankside,
Humping up full buckets from the river
To sluice the filth out of the buildings.
Months later we might still catch the stench.
Few if any sexual relationships
Were brokered or resumed in this period,
But there was a brisk market in commodities.
Electricity has become a legend,
A concept the young ones cannot grasp.
And sometimes we forget to boil the water
Or lack the fuel with which to do so,
Having consumed it in the imperative
To forge new weapons and new defenses
From scrap metals of the past regime.
These we render down, though there are alloys
Beyond our ability to melt.
Elsewhere the future may be in progress,
While here traffic makes its way on foot,
Porterage being a sort of livelihood.
The insects having returned to office
With their doctrinaire policies, losing
Is what we appear to be condemned to.
Laws, so-called, are vested in hard hands,
But we pass our nights in fear of pilferers
And our leisure at knuckle-bones and hazard
Punch-in-the-Face Poetry 