is probably bound to fall on deaf ears. I'm horrified
by the tone-deaf prosody: "little girl was gassed/
as bluish clouds of poison passed…" writes Walter Skold,
adding, "the war comes on little cat's feet,/
who crawl away and die in the street." No tyrant is scared,
but Carl Sandburg rolls in his grave. Someone named only "Gilbert"
contributes haiku, "A marine comes home/
Places jar on his mantle/Saddam's balls displayed." He's got
the formula right--five, seven, five syllables in three lines--more
than Martin Cohen can manage in his two-line,
eleven syllable composition labeled "Haiku." Rob S. Rice,
poetaster of the Wall Street Journal, looks to inspiration
from "Grant, and Sherman, Patton, Greene," leaving out
Rommel and Custer, Alexander, Pol Pot, and several other
spectacularly effective, but rhetorically inconvenient commanders.
The rhetorical question "Is it wrong to be The Superpower" [emphasis
in original] is asked by Sarah Dray, and is actually answered
in a footnote, "short answer is NO!" probably by the author,
or perhaps by a clumsy editor preparing the ms. for some audience
on whom all is lost. The "name of the Father, and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit" is invoked along with the name of "President"
Bush in Laura Basnight's "Prayer for the War." Mark Butterworth
introduces his poem "Imagine a world today without the USA in it
if you want a real horror story and imaginative nightmare" and then
he unleashes his poem. A lot of people here at the Poets for War
website still hate communists as much as E.E. Cummings did,
though not nearly as wittily. And it goes on like that, poem
after poem, arrogance to bloodlust, from Jai Ramachandran's adolescent
"National Poetry against the War Day" to Mike A.'s ignorant
"The Insanity of Islam." And I think I can keep enjoying cynical
chuckles at the expense of some unlettered strangers, but I read
among angry teenagers and war-mongering absurdists (some of them
want to attack France next) here and there a soldier waiting to ship out,
people cradling or smothering their fear--people who, misled,
begin to mislead. And worst of all, I see a name I recognize, someone
I've shaken hands with a few times, once when he read at St. Mark's.
And the way a competent poet can manage,
he makes me forget what he's talking about, as if he hid
the war behind a green light, under a green sea.
"Such a lie, such a lie/To deny this anguish….From such men/
As we saw that day,/In fear, in faith/Inch by inch/pushing back/
Gates of hell/With their bodies." It's a little musical, at least, and it takes
me a moment to decode it.
Listen to me, Robert:
I saw those towers burn and slump into their foundation
with men and women in them falling and murdered.
They were at work. They were trying to build and earn. And their pictures
from the Missing posters still haunt me because none of them looked
like people I didn't know. None of them died for a reason.
They just died. And if you can't honor them for who they were,
if you can't do something they would have wanted to do--aid and comfort
the living--then put down your head and put down your pen and cry.
© 2003 by Patrick Martin
*The "Poets for the War" website can be found here, proving that the internet is not always a good thing.
Cooler heads prevail here, in the U.S., and here, in the U.K.
I recommend moveon.org as a good place to start for activism.