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NEW CHAPBOOK AVAILABLE
Jesus’
War: Contemplation of Shock and Awe in
By John
R. Guthrie
Partisan
Press,
What are people saying about Jesus’ War?
With both scathing
irony toward the perpetrators of war, bigotry, and hypocrisy, and tenderness
toward their victims, John Guthrie leaves no doubt about where he stands. These
poems are an
…and though the generals have
accomplished nothing
still they
are planning the next battle.
Wise men seldom invoke war,
for what is
victory?
It differs very little from defeat.
—Poet
and Critic Lloyd Schwartz ,
First printing nearly all gone, but more are on the way;
$8.99 + $2.00 S & H:
GFPC Publications,
This compendium
includes but is not limited to poems about the war in
Homecomin
The last foot soldier has fallen,
The last pilot chuted into the sea
On tangled railroad tracks the crossties smoke;
wire fences hang in rusting disarray.
The tank protruding from the water,
the bridge now broken, fallen on its
knees.
These who were there, the witnesses to horror,
will they forget the fight and war’s
disease?
But now the earth is waking, the day is filled with labor
The cranes in the harbor are working once more.
The buildings begin to rise.
That’s how the city heals its wounds.
As people break and build again
a man walks toward his home;
he knocks. His mother opens the door
to greet her gray haired little boy.
§
By Ivan Elagin (b. Ivan Venediktovich Matveyev, 1918)
Translated from the Russian original by: John R. Guthrie
with appreciation to Natasha Kalinitcheva Guthrie
“Cousin Arza” is a remembrance of
a cousin of John R. Guthrie whose father was killed in the
Cousin Arza
In wizened mourning like the crow,
she made her way with small valise in
hand from
The Home, breathless, calling
to Mama from the road, Rosa, Rosa,
they put a Yankee woman in charge
of us!
She kept a box of salt-stained souvenirs
from preschool days;
the bundled letters he wrote home,
Daguerreotype, cover stamped with arabesque,
tin case upholstered within like a
coffin.
Her father was 28,
uniformed in solemn gray, kepi in hand,
cheeks pinked, clear eyes blued by
artist’s brush,
long hair neatly combed. Five dollars
for his “likeness,”
big money on a private’s pay! Like
every soldier
of every war contrived he pleads;
Please remember me.
After the seismic lead-chunk shock of
minié ball, nicked by the surgeon’s
forceps now,
mother Rebecca, Arza,
younger brother Ray,
that family with the honest pride of
calloused hands,
three cows, one sorrel mule, thirty-three
acres in corn,
gathered what remained of household goods
and moved to a foreign land called
Poverty and Ruin.
Mama in her apron at the front door now, soup ladle in hand
knew her story well, and also knew
how great issues conceal a million
bitter tragedies
as Arza,
ancient and frail as lace,
leaned on her dooryard gate.
§
The
Chickasaw
Nominated
for Small Press Puschcart Prize
From Volume IV #4. April, 2007
The
Chickasaw
Marvin Bell
(1937 - ) “Known as An insider who thinks like an
outsider," Marvin Bell was for many years Flannery O'Connor Professor of
Letters at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He also served as
Photo Source: Google Images
The interrogation celebrated spikes
and cuffs,
the inky blue that invades a blackened
eye,
the eyeball that bulges like a radish,
that incarnadine only blood can create.
They asked the young taxi driver
questions
he could not answer, and they beat his
legs
until he could no longer kneel on their
command.
They chained him by the wrists to
the ceiling.
They may have admired the human form
then,
stretched out, for the soldiers were also
athletes
trained to shout in unison and be buddies.
By the time his legs had stiffened,
a blood clot
was already tracing a vein into his
heart.
They said he was dead when they cut
him down,
but he was dead the day they arrested
him.
Are they feeding the prisoners
gravel now?
To make them skillful orators as they
confess?
Here stands Demosthenes in the
military court,
unable to form the words “my country.”
What
shall we do, we who are at war but are
asked
to pretend we are not? Do we need another
naive apologist to crown us with clichés
that would turn the grass brown above a
grave?
They called the carcass Mr. Dilawar. They
believed he was innocent. Their orders were
to step on the necks of the prisoners,
to
break their will, to make them say
something
in a sleep-deprived delirium of
fractures,
rising to the occasion, or, like Mr. Dilawar,
leaving his few possessions and his body.
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