GREAT CRUELTY AND HEARTLESSNESS
We’re living in a time of great cruelty and heartlessness
where instead of a sun they’re throwing up
anvils
Instead of sunlight there’s the sound of
hammers beating
Instead of walking there’s kicking
Instead of thinking there’s talking
It’s almost as if there’ve never been times like
these before
Even shadows thrown by cartwheels on dirt roads
resemble the grimaces of armies as they
slide across rocks
In the palaces of power clocks go off but no one
wakes
Decisions are made by pouring acid down drains
or waiting for nightfall in a room lit by
neon tubes
If anyone speaks all eyes are upon them
I saw a sparrow fly over a fence
An ant stop and not go on
But laughter has turned to pebbles
falling on zinc
And children have been torn from their futures
7/19
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THE ENORMOUS CORRIDOR OF SORROW
In the enormous corridor of sorrow
masked Napoleonic pygmies play with human
souls in the
shapes of coke bottles and guided missiles
and the clatter they raise
is more deafening than silence but
leads to the same end the same bolted door
A gigantic wheel rolls down
sorrow’s enormous corridor aclattering
as if to challenge with grief its mere
invention as the era of slaughter
though it doesn’t matter
I can’t find my eyes among the rubble
A tsunami traded for the killer instinct in
the heart of man might set out a tea set
in the enormous tidal wave enough to
engender a pretense at civility though
no one finds himself more content
than the self-justified mass murderer
at home with his happy shadows
7/26
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BIRDS BURST INTO FLOWER
As she saw bombs burst into her backyard
she saw birds burst into flower
As he bit into the sandwich of death
he saw blazing armies of angels ride down a distant hill
As they played in a circle holding hands for the
last time the wide-eyed children felt a
geyser of silver light lift them into heaven
Rotors and rollers across house roofs and voices
became symphonic variations with bells and xylophones
in the ears of their dwellers
A scream took the shape of a blue phoenix
shot upward over a now desolate restaurant
in a golden display of unfolding fire in whose
heat vibrations you can see all the dead
in their prime getting ready for the
grand fiesta
Faced with no alternative
the cornered soap seller sang his favorite
aria from Verdi opening his vest button by button
and his mouth at last over a gulf of silence
The last bird out of the city
kept the sun on her right as she wheeled to a
nearby pasture
its light on her feathers
flashing an SOS to no one
Though God saw it
and exclaimed His Name to Himself
in the constant midst of our
mortal conflagration
7/29
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LOVE EXCRUCIATING AS IT IS
In the midst of bomb blast
how can I raise my glass
to praise the Face of the one I love?
No tears nor beads of sweat no anguish
tortures its pure expression its moon
light cast on cornfield equally as on
crash and catastrophic collapse on
bodies below as vulnerable as mine
Horses and grandmothers babies and bystanders
caught in the crush
Whole countries cracked up yet a bee nearby
gets pollen on its legs and buzzes home
Light fills my window same as Kabah wall and
Medina Tomb whose inner galactic glow showers
a ray out on the world that refuses its
healing balm or tortures it to
be what it’s not
My loved one doesn’t need my praise nor even
to be less inscrutable as usual in these
circumstances and still shows the way
So I say “To this One there is no other
(mother brother father sister)
None to claim us but proclaim us as
we proclaim in lifted liquor to our lips
our love excruciating as it is”
Yet a feather blown by it
floats in the air
and remains there
8/1
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WORLD SPLIT APART
The façade of a building falls away and
reveals a man praying
A bakery loses its show-window showing a
hundred weddings who’ll have to
wait in the next world for their cakes
An Orthodox cathedral split in two
revealing a solemn baptism that’s now become
more like a drowning
A synagogue smashed like the tablets of Moses
the dust of the Torah continuing to
rise for years through the lunar cycles
A medieval mosque’s minaret struck into rubble
and the muezzin’s call going out bodiless
a hundred times louder
The road rutted with machinegun fire
and ghost cows dancing with their dazzled cowherds
New houses and old houses collapsing like cards
and the surprised furniture giving up their
inhabitants like birds released from their cages
Windows of government buildings falling into streets
revealing some making secret deals and others
receiving holy light for works of self-sacrifice
anonymously accomplished
A firehouse going up in flames and no
nozzle quenching it
A police department getting flattened and no
police whistles piping through the roar of falling plaster
Trees just coming into bud turning as black as
pokers their fruit both present and future
now gracing the fresh tables of the dead
Hillsides turning as black as ash
revealing lairs of tiny mammals
tremblingly shielding their young
This earth sliced apart like a unripe melon
revealing both incandescent fury
and radiant secrets of redemption
incomprehensibly intertwined
No one returning with a happy face at the
end of the day or followed by children like the
Pied Piper to safety beyond the rocks
The soul of man split asunder at the
first crack of unjust death and unjust retaliation
revealing a person naked drenched in
original water coming toward us surrounded by
anticipatory angels anxious for an
outcome already known to Him
who benignly created us
and Whose Voice rises inaudibly
above all other voices
saying over and over
the single word:
Peace
8/2
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AN ANTELOPE GREW TIRED OF LOPING
An antelope grew tired of loping
and became a small thatched cottage on the
shady side of a hill where old people and
loving couples would pass by from time to time
and knock on the door and find
no one home
A lynx in the forest saw a slanting ray of sunlight and
became a dragonfly hoping to scale it to its
source and live daringly and unlynxlike in its
bright delights above the earth forevermore
A stairway grew annoyed for the last time at all the
ups and downs ups and downs that went on and became a
prancing pony running free on hillsides of
buttercups and rhododendrons for one long
summer until it found itself taking
children around and around a corral which was
in any case better than being a staircase
And bankers became clouds and clergymen became
naked Roman statues and penguins remained penguins even
after given the opportunity of a lifetime to
leave the Antarctic once and for all
And we also in our constraints whistling to harmonize with
shrill factory letout or a Broadway orchestra or
the latest pop song
somehow bursting out of our solitary confinement from
time to time to knock on the
door of a little thatched shack on the
shady side of a hill and find
no one’s there that bounds off behind us
to be an antelope again joining its
nervous herd able at a
flick of an ear or tail to take off like a shot
as one beast singularly and explosively bursting with
fear and boundless joy
8/5
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THE ARROW
An arrow that left its bow in the Middle Ages
was still in orbit round and round the
earth not having found its target
flying straight ahead in the throes of Zeno’s
Paradox in time and space
its dark feathers intact
passing over the heads of us all and
looking down as it speeds past
thinking to itself “How sad they’ve become
with their bombs and technology
We’d shoot to kill and then it’s done
bad enough but nothing like
what they do now at the
flick of a switch”
8/20
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