Angeline
Poet Chick
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2002
- Posts
- 27,185
The website Poets Against the War is accepting submissions of poems or statements against a war with Iraq. Some of the world's best living poets (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Rita Dove, WS Merwin, and Adrienne Rich to name a few) have contributed to this site, as have more mundane folk (like me). Tomorrow, February 12, 2003, over 5,300 poems will be delivered to the White House.
This site is obviously not for everyone, and this post is not intended to inflame arguments or represent anyone's views but my own. Still, there is powerful poetry there and, to the best of my knowledge, the site is accepting poems beyond the 12th. If you wish to explore this further, lots of info, including submission guidelines, is available on the site.
Here's my submission. If you do submit, why not post your poem here as well.
Glossolalia
My voice is speaking
in tongues you cannot hear,
or will not listen
to voices crying over and over.
This is not glory.
This false hubris
is dead faces in gas masks
or bodies falling from boats
and filling the Atlantic,
where daddy was a medic in the
Third Wave.
There was no glory,
he said to me
or the night sky.
There was no honor.
Just death and surf,
and death and sand,
and death and death.
Innocence ripped
from exhausted boys,
knee deep in malaria
in north Africa and Bataan.
In Mei Lai the flames of children
screaming in Treblinka
or vaporized flash gone
in Nagasaki.
Children rolling over deserts
rife with land mines,
the legless ones who never walked,
hollow eyes in camps,
hordes hungering in mountain passes.
And even senseless children firing
the last of their innocence
at children sprawled
on the thorns of death
over art history and
organic chemistry books
on a warm spring morning.
We march into the unknown
only to discover
what mothers always know:
It’s just someone else’s child.
It’s all the same in the end,
all this marching
and cheering and waving
goes on and on and on,
but nobody ever owns
the world.
This site is obviously not for everyone, and this post is not intended to inflame arguments or represent anyone's views but my own. Still, there is powerful poetry there and, to the best of my knowledge, the site is accepting poems beyond the 12th. If you wish to explore this further, lots of info, including submission guidelines, is available on the site.
Here's my submission. If you do submit, why not post your poem here as well.
Glossolalia
My voice is speaking
in tongues you cannot hear,
or will not listen
to voices crying over and over.
This is not glory.
This false hubris
is dead faces in gas masks
or bodies falling from boats
and filling the Atlantic,
where daddy was a medic in the
Third Wave.
There was no glory,
he said to me
or the night sky.
There was no honor.
Just death and surf,
and death and sand,
and death and death.
Innocence ripped
from exhausted boys,
knee deep in malaria
in north Africa and Bataan.
In Mei Lai the flames of children
screaming in Treblinka
or vaporized flash gone
in Nagasaki.
Children rolling over deserts
rife with land mines,
the legless ones who never walked,
hollow eyes in camps,
hordes hungering in mountain passes.
And even senseless children firing
the last of their innocence
at children sprawled
on the thorns of death
over art history and
organic chemistry books
on a warm spring morning.
We march into the unknown
only to discover
what mothers always know:
It’s just someone else’s child.
It’s all the same in the end,
all this marching
and cheering and waving
goes on and on and on,
but nobody ever owns
the world.
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