On a Poetry Professor’s Presumption That All Political Poetry
Is a Rant and Therefore Unsuitable as a Subject for
Real Poetry and His Assignment of “Grandmothers”
as an Appropriate Topic for Students
after Antler’s “Writer’s Workshop”
In this war, this pre-
emptive war, this
ethnically cleansed,
this genocidal hell,
the woman described
as having a shattered
skull, having her brain
removed, having her
breasts ripped off, having
her chest cavity rent,
this scarecrow woman
impaled on a pole in a
plowed-by-armored-vehicle,
she dead
That woman was someone’s
grandmother
You don’t want to believe it
I could show you pictures
“A poem, even a bad poem, was harder to kill than
a cockroach.” Karl Shapiro
Bred in the dark
like tiny monsters
with flexible spindle
thin legs for scuttling
the way crabs do,
shunning the light
the feral tide of
whiskey scented winds
No hermetically sealed
container can prevent
them from wheedling
their way inside,
from stealing letters
from the alphabet
for food,
nourishment in the form
of images as
palpable as the represented
object of desire,
the actual thing
implacable as a spoken
truth; they are what
words infer they are,
sometimes more, often less
War Game Docudrama
movie made for
BBC in middle 60’s
re after the atomic bomb
falls
truths and consequences
for England
but never shown on
TV as it was declared
“too disturbing”
Seen now as
somewhat quaint
though still controversial
for realistic death scenes by:
fallout
fire
radiation sickness
oxygen depravation
special effects lame
compared to what modern
viewers are used to
the reality they show
much much
worse
Tall Bound Blindfolded Man in Frozen Frames
The silence is absolute after
the rifles’ fire
Five grey gusts of smoke
motionless just beyond the barrels
And the odd, contorted face of
the El Capitan after the order to shoot
has been given
You have to imagine the sound
of his voice
The rifles’ retort
And the echo after in the courtyard
Bullets finding their mark in
the tall, bound, blindfolded man
or gone astray
with others from days past
in the thick, adobe walls that lie
just beyond the limp figure of the target
12 Safe Places to Die
1-In a graveyard, reading the headstones,
in the rain
2-Over the waterfall, on raft, still
wearing the flag
3-In the desert, before sunrise, on
a flat alkaline plain
4-By the lake, with the loons calling,
the fog rising
5-In the helicopter, over the LZ,
almost home free
6-Strapped in with the crash test dummies,
heading toward a wall
7-On the beach at low tide, among the men
of war, on the flat blue sea
8-Three fathoms deep, enraptured by
the deep
9-Sky diving, free falling the currents, no
parachute to interrupt the flight
10-On the golf course, under a spreading
chestnut tree with a nine iron
11-In a bank vault, all the safe deposit boxes
open, all the security cameras off
12-In the underground White House, with the chosen
few, after the bombs have begun to fall
Another Tasteful Discussion of Contemporary War
The children’s crusade begins at noon,
a massacre of innocents follows soon
after and the plasma, wall-sized TV they
are watching is either out-of-focus, tuned
into some modern artist’s patterned canvas
or else troop movements and new recruits
have been camouflaged by a new kind of sky
blue and white pattern, everyone, everything
blended so perfectly no one can sense
a vertiginous loss of place, the weightless
soldiers and their ships neither up nor down,
not anywhere in time or place in this room
or any other room as the well-groomed guests
and their hosts sip amber cocktails, not really
watching what is happening, what the TV
represents, what is slowly being absorbed
into the blood.