September

September

"When they put bombs in cars and kill people, they're uncivilized
killers. When we put bombs on missiles and kill people, we're up
holding civilized values"
- Norman Solomon Orwellian Logic 101 - A Few Simple Lessons

I Little Boy vs Fat Man
Baby blue, with hands so bloody, runs through
the city streets; clutching the baseball bat to his chest,
striking out twenty-thousand times in front of the home crowd
wearing a sackcloth uniform, he brushes ashes from his shoulders
exposing the welts and weal's, the red stripes run white and blue
here
(a dozen have gathered on his neck) as he runs
the twenty-five square mile field, playing to the bleachers, playing
ball.

The phones echo tonight, with songs from Nagasaki (a boy
writes a poem of seventy thousand words) tied to peacock
feathers.
After he dies, after he is old, after he is bald and black
The lines fall from his hand and root in the soil, they seed.
In time, the city chokes and one hundred and fifty thousand words
are taken to the bridge and cast into the Nakashima.

II No Gun Ri
Mothers wrapped their children with blankets and hugged them
with their backs to the bridge (thirty million reasons to leave
and
one to stay), they let their toes curl in the morning earth and
heard
from the little yellow book of little words, fading on telex
sheets
That all shall be made a new, Amen.

Like boys playing with flies; beneath, a pyre of steel
For three days the breeze was blowing, clouds passed over their
heads
The children's song never stopped, not for rifle or echo.

III Bui Doi, Mai Lai
(in the jewellery store of his father-in-law) he dreams of dust; speaks
of it
to ghosts by the roadside. He sits on his wooden porch, faded and
crack'd
(in black and white photographs), playing marbles on corrugated lead
sheets
(licking his fingers) he sings to himself of water buffaloes; a song of
devotion
a song of rice and wind, of father and daughter, of man and child, in
Quang Ngai.
He hasn't played hide and seek since then, he won too easily, he rolled
away.

IV Kandahar, her smile forever singing
Stretching the lost songs of Khan Aga behind her; she runs through the
city.
At Bori Chokar and Chowker-Karez, she plants pomegranate seeds
(in the flesh of her womb) and sings to the soil; shrapnel is the
shroud
that clings to the round curve of her breast, each shard a song.
She has played each note between finger and thumb, pulled and buried in
the dust.
(Cursed and spat on) she has returned to Sarai Shamali by the road that
led to her foe
red eyes she gave him, milk white and blue, now she will give him
songs
(strapped to her belly) from the earth of the Kapisa Valley.