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Inauguration Ball
Fireworks above like a battlefield flare
Fine caviar by the shovels full.
Orchestral music fills the air.
Sterling platters, crystal flutes
Neatly placed on jacquard linen
(those flutes reminiscent of mortar
shells).
Such elegance! What a lovely time!
Insouciant, self-congratulent,
scions of the nation’s wealth and power,
weapons makers, the Haliburton
crowd
oil CEOs; their grandest hour.
Gaunt orphans beg and starve and
die.
Fireworks for the
innocents of that place?
Shock and Awe must suffice.
Their
ballroom is their grave.
Toxins, germs,
those WMD’s?
Never were! Soldiers wary of IEDs
Sweaty and weary,
cold MRE’s.
Walking wounded at Walter Reed,
Eyes and limbs lost in the fight.
Working
class! Embarrassing!
Better keep them out of sight.
Wealth dances away the night.
In a distant land on the
burning sand,
another falls and dies.
--John R. Guthrie,
1.23.05
Two
poems by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). A teacher, he visited a hospital for war wounded on the
Continent, then
decided to enter the
British army “…help these boys” by
leading them as an officer in the Royal Army. He Was killed in a
German machine gun attack one week before the end of WW I. On November 11 in his hometown of
Lines From “Dulce
et Decorum”
…If in some
smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
THE PARABLE OF THE OLD MAN
AND THE YOUNG
So
Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and
trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven;
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of
Sir
Gawaine; Knight Errant of Poetry
Growing up, his
adult relatives were alcoholics. Trying to find something, perhaps himself, he
hitchhiked as a young man to nearly every state in the
Still, there came a
point in his mid-twenties when he fully realized his despair. And in such dark
moments of the soul’s night mightn’t we be perpetually lost if we lack the
vision and audacity to reinvent ourselves?
In that he had
never had positive male role models, he decided to choose one. He knew quite
well that of all the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, Sir Gawaine, was the most fearless, the most debonair, the most
loyal. He was Guinevere's personal champion as well.
He decided that Gawaine’s ideals would be his
guiding star and dubbed himself “Sir Gawaine Ross.” And
that had been his name ever since. It is thus that he reinvented the troubled young
man that he had been as Gawaine’s namesake and
continues to this day to be known to his friends as Sir Gawaine.
The Bad Priest
by Sir Gawaine
In
(I think it was Easter, 1438)
I was a priest and somehow can
recall
The dim church, the heavy clouds of
frankincense
And the knights
and burgesses lining up for communion.
I chanted the magic words and did
The magic gestures but instead of
the wine
Becoming the blood of our blessed
Lord,
It changed into piss.
I was not ready for this.
Inside the chalice, the reflection
Of my own most hideous face -
As I poured out my face onto the
floor
A thousand rats writhing in a sea of
worms
Destroyed my last
pretense to piety.
The congregation - the whores no
less than
The robber barons - knew that I was
one of them
And could no
longer hide the fact.
The stained glass windows buckled
and shattered,
The cathedral roof fell, and we all
shrieked
As the earth quaked and God
Was deaf to the
sobs of the amputees.
For the unforgivable crime of
sacrilege
The ecclesiastical tribunal
interrogated me
Under the direction of the Bishop
and
His Dominican
friars. Those Domine Canes
(The Lord’s bloodhounds) figured I’d
sold
My soul to the adversary and when
they
Hung me up backwards and hammered
My ankles and elbows
I became convinced that they must be
right
For they showed such tender concern
For the state of
my soul.
I confessed and prepared myself
For being burned at the stake.
There would be no merciful
strangling instead.
I could pray for the grace of God,
But I knew I wouldn’t get it.
I could not even look forward to
oblivion
As I regarded that yellow shirt
Printed with the Devil’s signs
That I’d have to wear
On that morning of
jeers and blows.
My friends will ask for my
forgiveness
As they set the
straw afire.
Will I be a Christian then?
--end--
Pablo Neruda: Also, see Neruda Article Under “Articles.”
Body of a
Woman
by Pablo Neruda
Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.
I only was a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and nigh swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.
But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!
Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.
Lines
from one of Neruda’s political poems, “The Battle of the Jarama
River.” (the battle occurred on
…The coarse-milled flour of your
people
Bristled everywhere with metal and bones,
Formidable like a field of wheat,
like the noble earth
They defended…
Jarama, to find words for your regions
Of splendor and master, my mouth
Is not equal to it, and my hand is
pale:
There your
dead remained….
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