Birds, Indran Amirthanayagam
Birds that eat salt,
hand about cemeteries,
forage in abandoned lots,
civil war crows
fattened on carnage
from roadside bombs,
gorged vultures
loping from body
to body, picking
eyes clean
before clambering
up into trees
that have survived
hanging still
over the silent beach.
Haikus, Jack Kerouac
The little sparrow
on my eave drainpipe
is looking around
The smoke of old
naval battles
is gone
Listen to the birds sing!
All the little birds
Will die!
Dusk—the bird
on the fence
A contemporary of mine
Emergence, Joy Harjo
It’s midsummer night. The light is skinny;
a think skirt of desire skims the earth.
Dogs bark at the musk of other dogs
and the urge to go wild.
I am lingering at the edge
of a broken heart, striking relentlessly
against the flint of hard will.
It’s coming apart.
And everyone knows it.
So do squash erupting in flowers
the color of the sun.
So does the momentum of grace
gathering allies
in the partying mob.
The heart knows everything.
I remember when there was no urge
to cut the land or each other into pieces,
when we knew how to think
in beautiful.
There is no world like the one surfacing.
I can smell it as I pace in my square room,
the neighbor’s television
entering my house by waves of sound.
Makes me think about buying
a new car, another kind of cigarette
when I don’t need another car
and I don’t smoke cigarettes.
A human mind is small when thinking
of small things.
It is large when embracing the maker
of walking, thinking and flying.
If I can locate the sense beyond desire,
I will not eat or drink
until I stager into the earth
with grief.
I will locate the point of dawning
and awaken
with the longest day in the world.
Love and How It Becomes Important in Our Day to Day Lives, Miller Williams
The man who tells you which is the whiter wash,
the woman who talks about her paper towels,
the woman whose coffee holds her home together,
the man who smells the air in his neighbor’s house,
the man who sings a song about his socks,
the woman who tells how well her napkin fits,
the ma who sells the four-way slicer-dicer,
the woman who crosses tape between her tits,
and scores besides trample my yard, a mob
demanding to be let in, like Sodomites
yelling to get at my guests but I have no guests.
I crawl across the floor and cut the lights.
“We know you’re in there,” they say. “Open the door.”
“Who are you?” I say. “What do you want with me?”
“What does it matter?” they say. “You’ll let us in.
Everyone lets us in. You’ll see. You’ll see.”
The chest against the door begins to give.
I settle against a wall. A window breaks.
I cradle a gun in the crook of my elbow.
I hear the porch collapse. The whole house shakes.
Then comes my wife as if to wake me up,
a case of ammunition in her arms.
She settles herself against the wall beside me.
“The towns are gone,” she says. “They’re taking the farms.”
Dialougue, Ed Ochester
I’m sorry that I have misjudged you.
Your slaughter of the innocents
led me astray. An old professor
put the worst possible interpretation on it.
Forgive me for the time
I said you were mistake
when you bombed the infants’ hospital.
I see now that you have averted war.
When you machine-gunned the five thousand cripples
I questioned the wisdom of your action,
but now I find it was to protect my job.
I was a fool to suggest you misled us
in the campaign against mental defectives.
It was preserved our way of life.
Now that I understand you
I wonder about nothing,
except where the next threat
is to come from.
This is How Memory Works, Patricia Hampl
You are stepping off a train.
A wet blank night, the smell of cinders.
A gust of steam from the engine swirls
around the hem of your topcoat, around
the hand holding the brown leather valise,
the hand that, a moment ago, slicked back
the hair and then out on the fedora
in front of the mirror when the beveled
edges in the cherrywood compartment.
The girl standing on the platform
in the Forties dress
has curled her hair, she has
nylon stockings—no, silk stockings still.
Her shoulders are touchingly military,
squared by those shoulder pads
and a sweet faith in the Allied.
She is waiting for you.
She can be wearing a hat, if you like.
You see her first.
That’s part of the beauty:
you get the pure, eager face,
the lyrical dress, the surprise.
You can have the steam,
the crowded depot, the camel’s-hair coat,
real leather and brass claps on the suitcase;
you can make the lights glow with
strange significance, and the black cars
that pass you are historical yet ordinary.
The girl is yours,
the flowers dress, the walk
to the streetcar, a fried egg sandwich
and a joke about Mussolini.
You can have it all:
you’re in that world, the only way
you’ll ever be there now, hired
for your silent hammer, to nail pictures
to the walls of his mansion
made of thinnest air.
The War Zone, Joy Harjo
Yesterday in the flare of smoke and temper—
we were brilliant warriors weary
from battling each other—
the illuminations of family ghosts
bright red in the storm.
The century is swept toward an inevitable end—
as summer trees sway beneath thunderclouds,
the wind flattening our faces—
Our teeth make refuge for our tongues,
skins pulled tight in the vertigo of fear
under unbearable
pressure.
We go on.
Apology, Richard Cecil
The war fought by soldiers in machines
manufactured by their wives: steel skin,
for example, impervious to a caress.
But I am single. I line up with conscripts.
I’m issued sleep confiscated from a civilian
in a safe country. I’m handed a photograph
of his lover to tape inside my locker.
I’m marched to a bed too narrow for her
and me and him together, though he lies
inside me, though she’s very slender.
How heavy this green blanket
lies against my neck! How cold this rifle!
I’m told the dream which he surrendered,
half in one ear, half in the other,
about Alaska. But it twists inside me.
Which of us is a wolf? Which caribou?
Which the tundra? Nobody volunteers his throat,
his appetite, or his cold white isolation
for the sake of peace to anybody else tonight.
We circle on the snow, but the snow drifts over.
I wake beside you thousands of mornings later
when the sergeant shakes my shoulder
to ask if I want a kiss. If it seems too rough,
too desperate for one night’s separation
with only sleep between us, excuse me,
there was a war lost and almost a soldier
with it, not in the jungle with the rest,
but solitary, hunted, on the ice.
"Ferrore," from What Are the Most Unusual Things You Find in Garbage Cans?, James Schevill
(A journalist questions members of the Scavenger’s Protective Association, Inc.)
I’ve found helmets, medals, and a bayonet
For my World War I collection. The bayonet’s
The first kind they make where you stick it in,
Twist, and it don’t come out without
Bringing half a guy’s insides with it.
I like to take a war in the past.
The uniforms were more colorful,
And to wear those helmets you musta
had a head as strong as a rock.
When you got a medal, they strung it
Real fruitcake on a rainbow ribbon.
You didn’t just load your chest with
Little bars and flags like now.
The Battle, Louis Simpson
Helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat
Marched through a forest. Somewhere up ahead
Guns thudded. Like the circle of a throat
The night on every side was turning red.
The halted and they dug. They sank like moles
into the clammy earth between the trees.
And soon the sentries, standing in their holes,
Felt the first snow. Their feet began to freeze.
At dawn the first shell landed with a crack.
Then shells and bullets swept the icy woods.
This lasted many days. The snow was block.
The corpses stiffened in their scarlet hoods.
Most clearly of that battle I remember
The tiredness in eyes, how hands looked thin
Around a cigarette, and the bright ember
Would pulse with all the life there was within.
