The Poetry Of.
Andrew Grossman...........................
Dream of the National Conscience
Rust hangs from the trees in clumps,
Drips and stains the yard sale fliers.
Another and another to put an 'x' beside:
Lost friends, countries, unChristian behaviour;
Places I will never see, people I can never face.
Useless, is what Josh said, who was there.
He drove trucks, magnets for IEDs.
The thing I can't say
is I lay in bed and see the road,
see myself in his seat
with the wheel slipping through my fingers,
the shell splinters filling the air,
and I feel so uselessly guilty,
I feel the numbers of the casualties,
their faces looking on through the clouds,
and the rain is reversed
that I have launched
to soak the world for my comfort,
it comes back, it comes in a black bladder
of accumulated shit and hate.
Down Decatur County, the Guthrie Center gang
hangs on Leon Square, where the word is:
Free Thanksgiving Turkeys
With $100 Worth of Groceries.
Smartie's got fourteen bucks, Loco with chump change,
Petty less than ten? it takes begging
From Conover and Skitz's friends,
but we round it up.
A thirty pounder
to feed us all, and then some.
And then, to piss off the moms
We'll buy a hundred bucks of chips and gum.
I'll have diarrhea, but fresh breath.
Bonehead's shipping out. He's home
Just for the twenty-fifth.
Not a happy camper, being his second trip.
He's given me the duty of watching Charity.
Don't you trust her? I asked.
You know what happened last time, he said,
but I don't know.
Fear is forgetting that dreams exist
not only for teenagers in their soft beds,
but for the dead in their dryness.
They kiss me on the mouth
with the sharp taste of the earth.
Their pain is no longer real,
but it strikes me over and over.
I am chased by their memories.
If I stop to face them, they fill me
So that my fingers pull the trigger
Of the gun that killed them.
Every moment of distraction
Away from absorbing my culpability
Is piled on my heart in a rockslide.
No one sleeps inside me,
No one dreams. A host of victims
Saw at my organs with their fingernails.
Feel this! they demand.
I am liquid
Flowing to flood another's tear ducts.
What Do We Extinguish of Ourselves?
He writes his letters and in the motion of writing
he focuses on the black ink staining the white paper
he cannot stop his hand from moving
the pen goes deeper into the fabric
he spills the bucket of what he has seen
the spread-eagled mothers the children
drawn out to a red beam of liquid
page after page he writes his letters home
black on white and sent to the sky
he writes to his mother to his friends to his instructor
...................
one sentence each that ends as it begins
fades into the page scrapes to the margin
he is writing when they find him
he is putting a postscript to his name
Flown Across Many Nations
Flown across many nations, across many oceans of change,
To regather the peace that was abruptly taken,
to share brotherly tears in unspeakable pain.
We can tear bread rather than tear each other, we
Can offer the dead a feast of the gentle body's flesh.
Please accept this present that emanates love
As we stand on the rubble from which war rippled forth.
Let us dig down to the pavement known to our mothers
As they worked together to sustain the family, to live.
Break earth with me, it is not too dry for our trained hands.
A Truth, Said Quietly
No bomb sets our bitter wounds on fire.
No one pushes death from the sky.
The red bolts are fired from our windows.
The left hand is at war with the right.
.................
No fleeing from the city will suffice.
When we stop to breathe, the war is us
In refugee camps, in transports, in
The stones from the shale beds of dead rivers.
We must take the whips from the hands
Of these cattlemen we call leaders
And whip them back, whip our foment down.
Nobody takes from us. We take our open eyes,
bite them out with our gnashing teeth,
We make a stew of blindness for food.
Nobody dangles us from the sky. Nations laugh,
Knowing we are occupied by our chains,
But never shrug them loose, never let our hands
Go limp, our shoulders bow to the wisdom of peace?
We can sleep, dear countrymen.
Let us rest from our endless self-affliction,
lay our scarred, frightened faces to the grass,
we are creatures of spirit, of spiritual blood.
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