Thoughts on the Aughts: Notes on the 9-11 Decade
An online chapbook
Taps
(Or, May 31, 2010)
Day is done.
Gone the sons.
The daughters and the mothers,
the fathers and the others.
Tomorrow arises,
and more advisers
will give opinions
on the public’s attitudes
of which longitudes and latitudes
justify our intervention.
And which friends’ atrocities
we’ll ignore, and which we’ll tsk tsk.
But at what risk
do we apply our double standards?
And how many more standards will be borne
by how many ships and worn
by how many caskets?
Each double standard doubles those standards
covering the caskets arriving in plane loads.
Our politicians believe it’s better not to ask it--
better not to ask that question, and bite the hand that feeds
the coffers and the coffins.
Holy Wars
(Notes Found in GW Bush’s Poetry Journals)
I.
We’ll negotiate with our friends and threaten our enemies.
If our friends can’t negotiate nicely,
we’ll threaten them.
We’ll negotiate with our enemies,
once they’re ground into the dirt.
We’re honest brokers, buying low and selling high.
Life is a gamble; make sure you’ve got collateral to damage.
II.
Abraham sacrificed his sons for God—
rows and rows of them, in airplane bellies,
boxed and wrapped.
God let him have Isaac,
but inflation drove up the price of God’s love.
No more token sacrifices accepted—only real sons now.
III.
Blessed are the poor in spirit;
they don’t need our handouts.
The meek will inherit the lowlands.
Let them build an ark when the rains come.
Suffer, little children.
IV.
Like the fruit fly, we multiply.
Our swarm will cover the earth and feed on its ripeness.
Eat it down to the pit.
We came 6,000 years ago
and stayed just long enough to enjoy the fruits of God’s labors.
We’ll be reborn as angels stuck with pins in God’s collection.
Spring 2009
(Apologies to Robert Frost)
I have been one acquainted with the Right.
I have observed their game--their hate and blame.
I have observed they’re mostly male and white.
I have browsed through their rantings on the ‘net.
I have left comments on their blogs, with facts.
I haven’t changed their rigid minds, not yet.
I have sat still and heard the strident call
of those who claim America is theirs--
despite their losing numbers of last Fall.
Their rumors wild appeal to those who fear
that changing times will leave them far behind.
They won’t go down without a fight, that’s clear.
They’ll shriek their accusations day and night.
I have been one acquainted with the Right.
Your Nightmare, My Nightmare
After some years
the fear has settled in the bottom of my mind,
pushed down like grounds in a French press coffee pot.
I still breathe its essence. It keeps me on my toes,
stirs my anger--
my anger for all the shattered lives--
their shards scattered here and there.
Sometimes, a strong taste of fear floats up
when I see you; though I long to run my fingers
through your jet black hair.
I taste the bitterness of your memories.
That night I will dream of running, running
as night falls
in a city of smoking, broken buildings.
It looks like your old hometown,
but I know it is my city.
I close my eyes, hoping to wake
in the light of a different dawn.
Two Perspectives on War
We kill by pushing a button.
We die running for cover.
We are fighting for our country.
We are fighting for a country.
Our sons fear deployment.
Our children fear bombardment.
We bury our dead in the national cemetery.
We have discovered a mass grave.
We proudly display our flag.
We’ve been arrested for displaying our flag
Our war is raising the national debt.
Our markets have no food for sale.
Our mothers grieve for their children.
Our people grieve for their villages.
Our homes feel empty until our soldiers return.
I have no home; I watched my house burn.
Our son came home in a coffin on a plane.
We buried a piece of flesh that we gave a name.
We watched the parade of soldiers in uniform.
Our soldiers blend in with everyone else.
We’ve carefully weighed the costs and benefits.
We decided there was nothing to lose.
Ballad of a Two-War Army
The troops are worn out,
the Army stretched thin,
we’re recruiting delinquents,
the old and the dim.
We got rid of the gays,
to preserve the troops’ purity .
Even those who spoke Arabic,
no matter how fluently.
(Mistakes have been made,
for lack of translation.
But isn’t that better
than eternal damnation?)
We’re telling the soldiers
“One more tour of duty.”
The program’s called “stop loss;”
it might cause mutiny.
The Humvees were patched
with armor homemade;
it didn’t stop bombs
or rocket grenades.
Veterans are stricken
with nightmares and fears.
Some find no escape from
their dreams or their tears.
It’s no longer a war;
it’s called occupation.
But we don’t seem to know
how to rebuild a nation.
We’re good with artillery
and planting land mines.
What we can’t seem to do
is win hearts and minds.
The lessons of history
seem lost on our leaders,
who aren’t moral figures
but careful poll readers.
There are those we should judge
for their lies and their crimes
and the grief they have caused
in these sad and dark times.
How many years
will we take to recover
from these ill-planned debacles
which aren’t even over?
The Pen v. the Sword
I.
You signal danger in semaphore; we, in metaphor.
We’ll combat your anti-personnel mines with our slant rhymes.
Alliteration is prettier than obliteration.
The unwary are killed by cluster bomblets but live forever in sonnets.
We speak 140 languages and you only speak one.
Genocides always miss a few, who carefully keep recipes and diaries.
Unearthed from the sediment of ruined cities, the markings on a stone tablet
can still be read.
II.
Shakespeare knew
that it’s natural for Capulets and Montagues
to fall in love.
Pre-emptively, you’ve built a wall against the neighbors.
Gun towers and blockades prevent miscegenation.
The gene pools shrink,
and two peoples will birth deformed babies
who cannot speak nor write.
Score one for you.
III.
Your search for the white whale goes on and on;
we will never see dry land.
He is resting in a hidden cove
while a thousand pods of belugas roam freely in the seas.
Who will write the ending? The arc of the story has been lost.
The Mourning Place
Above the mourning place
the giant cranes dip and pull,
knitting bones of steel and iron
rising from the empty hull.
Each day brings to mind a face
not forgotten. Someone remembers a
member, dismembered, burnt to ashes,
blown across the sea--
an imprint etched in memory.
An empty space needs filling.
Not to bury memory,
but to dress the injury.
End at last our misery.
The annual recitation,
a liturgy of lamentation,
names intoned by fresh-scrubbed faces,
prolongs and not erases
sadness and stagnation.
We’ll heal the wound
with steel and purpose,
brokers, workers (fewer tourists).
Life anew above the tomb
and quiet monuments enduring--
of stone and water, trees and grass--
to mark that sad day as past.
Gentrification
You crept up the floors of our buildings--
like the strangler vine that kills the tree,
at first you seemed harmless.
We saw our homes’ values rise,
and we were happy,
until we saw your “improvement” projects.
The ones we had to pay for.
In the rainforest of humanity poetry and art grew
in basements and tenements, took root and blossomed
in fertile concrete soil.
Invasive species insidiously destroyed the habitat.
Lofts and studios are now just names used to make a buck.
Block after block, where once reigned Mom-and-Pop,
nameless worker bees serve brands and logos.
You emerge from glass and steel pods; you all look exactly alike.
We never confused a sofa with art or a restaurant with a song.
Your vacuum life is sucking out our breath,
you charge us to breathe the air.
Your money is a virus, it kills and leaves
zombies, who feed on the flesh of the last living.
An update of Ogden Nash’s “Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer”
This is a song not to celebrate banks.
They are no longer full of money and if you own their stock
you only now hear wails as it tanks.
Or maybe a sound like the wind in the trees on the hills,
which is the rustling of the thousand dollar bills
that bankers took from their government bailout,
while angry taxpayers fumed and flailed about.
Congressional representatives seem unconcerned
that some live in marble halls,
and others have homes no more to live in.
People can’t pay off bad loans they were given.
Banks bundled and sold credit derivatives to hedge funds,
whose managers now look at worthless assets, stunned.
They can’t sell their five bedroom condos.
Let’s not give any more money to those
who made reckless decisions; most of us must live
with the results of decisions we chose.
We should all observe one rule and woe betide the government official
who fails to heed it:
Which is, you must never give any money to anybody unless
they really need it.
Like a homeless family from New Orleans.
Why toss good money after bad?
Why should we trust the bankers’ schemes
to repay the money we loaned them?
Instead of bailing out banks
maybe our country should own them.
I think we should jail failed CEOs.
Funny how they suppose
the government’s just their piggy bank.
We, the people, must take back the reins of power
and break free from these chains, which drag heavier and heavier
by the hour.
Two Kings: A Fable
Once there was a King who was really a commoner;
he walked the hard road with the rest of us.
Like any good soldier, he was willing to die for his cause.
His heir was a commoner who became a king.
The first King knew war was fought for money
and by the ignorant and the desperate.
The new king told us he’d end war
if we just made HIM king, but when crowned,
ordered the troops to march farther.
The old King knew that as long as the rich ruled the poor
there would be neither democracy nor peace.
But the new king learned that with the aid of the rich,
a poor man could become a king.
The old King saw that commoners all over the world
were brothers and sisters under the same thumb.
But the new king saw HE could be the favorite son.
The old King was murdered and when the new king was crowned
many thought he would follow the old King’s path.
But a few people saw something different and muttered under their breath
“house n*****.”
About the Poet:
Anne Rettenberg is Editor of Eat a Peach: A Poetry Journal. Normally she publishes poems from diverse authors, but decided after 10 years (actually more than 10 years) of national insanity to put her poems/rants in one issue of Eat a Peach.