Resisting ‘war time’ ─ Poets and their Poetry

Respectfully excerpted no copyright claimed for Today’s Insight News by Carolyn Bennett

GOOD CLEAN FUN

Diane di Prima

It’s terrorism, isn’t it, when you’re afraid to answer the door
for lack of a Green Card

afraid to look for work, walk into the hospital when your child is sick,

and what else than terrorism could you call
those smallpox blankets we gave the Indians

the trail of tears, the raids on Ghost Dancing tribes

It’s terrorism when you’re forbidden to speak your language

paddled for it, made to run a hundred laps in the snow

in your thin and holey sneakers. What do you call it

when you’re locked in your high school classroom,
armed policemen manning the halls?
Isn’t it terrorism to force a young woman

to talk to her parents about her clandestine love

the child she will or will not carry?
Is it terrorism to shoot striking onion workers (1934),
pick off AIM members one by one?

What happened to the Hampton family in Chicago [in] bed;

would you call that terrorism? Or the MOVE kids in Philadelphia

bombed in their home. Or all the stories we don’t know

buried in throats stuffed w/socks, or pierced w/bullets.

Would you call it terrorism, what happened at Wounded Knee

or the Drug Wars picking off the youth of our cities
twenty years ago now; you know the names.

What was COINTELPRO if not terrorism?

What new initials are they calling it today?

Is Leonard Peltier a victim of terrorism? Is Mumia Abu-Jamal?

Is it terrorism if you are terrified of the INS, the IRS, the landlord,

your boss, the man who might do your job for less?

if you're scared of your health insurance no health insurance

scared of your street, your hallway, scared every month

you might not get to the 1st and the next measly check?

Is it terrorism to take food from hungry school-kids?

To threaten teenagers who still have hope enough

have joy enough to bring babies into this mess?

How has terrorism touched you, shaped your life?

Are you afraid to go out, to walk in your city,
your suburb, your countryside?

To read, to speak your own language, wear your tribe’s clothes?

Afraid of the thin-shelled birds w/twisted necks

poisoned by nitrates, by selenium?

Afraid that the dawn will be silent, the forests grey?

Is it terrorism to fill the Dnieper w/radiation?

or heat the ionosphere w/magnetism ‘to see what will happen’?

A wonderful weapon, they say, it will perturb

the weather pattern, disrupt communications

Who are the terrorists in the lumber wars?

(the water wars are coming)

And we haven’t even talked about AIDS and cancer.

Is the assault on native intelligence and good will

that we call the evening news

anything other than an act of terror?

What was the Gulf War but terrorism

wearing the death mask of order? and one big car bomb it was

the guys who drove it dying now one by one

Is acid rain a form of terrorism? (Think for yourself.)

Is GATT or NAFTA anything but a pact among brigands
and their back-up men?

How long before they fight over the spoils?

Who’ll do their fighting for them?

Is Alan Greenspan perhaps the biggest known & named

of our terrorist leaders, here,
nurtured here, trained here

the dark design of whose hearts makes

Hutu and Tutsi

Croat and Muslim and Serb

mere diversionary tactics before the onslaught

Diane di Prima (b. Brooklyn, New York, 1934)
Diane di Prima in 2009 was Poet Laureate of San Francisco and in 2006 received the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and community service. She is the author of 43 books of poetry and prose, including Pieces of a Song (City Lights, 1990). Her work has been translated into at least twenty languages. She has received grants for her poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1993, she received an Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the National Poetry Association. In May/June 1994 she was Master Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In 1999, she received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from St. Lawrence University. In Spring, 2000, she was Master Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College, Chicago. Her autobiographical memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman was published by Viking in April 2001. In her Manhattan years, she was an important writer of the Beat movement and co-founded the New York Poets Theatre; founded the Poets Press that published the work of many new writers of the period. She co-edited the literary newsletter The Floating Bear (1961-1969). Diane Di Prima has lived in northern California for the past thirty-four years. Biography of Diane Di Prima, http://dianediprima.com/bio.html

American Wars

Ursula K. Le Guin

Like the topaz in the toad's head

the comfort in the terrible histories

was up front, easy to find:

Once upon a time in a kingdom far away.

Even to the dreadful now of news we listened comforted

by far timezones, languages we didn't speak,

the wide, forgetful oceans.

Today, no comfort but the jewel courage.

The war is ours, now, here, it is our republic

facing its own betraying terror.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (b. Berkeley, California, 1929 -)
Ursula K. Le Guin has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, three collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards. Three of Le Guin's books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Among many honors her writing has received a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA’s [Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s] Grand Master, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Margaret A. Edwards Award. Her latest publications include Incredible Good Fortune: New Poems (Shambhala 2006); the Annals of the Western Shore: Gifts, (Harcourt 2004, paperback edition 2006); Voices (Harcourt, September 2006), and Powers, (Harcourt, September 2007); Lavinia (Harcourt, April 2008). Though now retired, she has taught writing workshops from as far distanced places as Vermont-USA and Australia. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Ursula K. Le Guin: Biographical Sketch, http://www.ursulakleguin.com/BiographicalSketch.html; http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Biography-70Word.html

Umoja: Each One of Us Counts

Rita Dove

Do those who failed still miss the wind,

that sweet breath from the sky?

Do they still covet rock and moss

or the swift, hard blink of the lizard's eye?

We walk on water, we are written on air.

Let us honor the lost, the snatched, the relinquished,

those vanquished by glory, muted by shame.

Stand up in the silence they've left and listen:

those absent ones, unknown and unnamed --

Remember! their whispers fill the arena.

Rita Dove (b. Ohio, 1952- )
Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. From 1993 to 1995, she was Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress. From 2004 to 2006, she was Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Her writing and collections include The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992), essays under the title The Poet’s World (1995), and the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London, and other theatres. Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998. Her latest poetry collection, Sonata Mulattica, was published by W.W. Norton & Company in the spring of 2009. Rita Dove was a 1970 Presidential Scholar and received her B.A. from Miami University (Ohio), an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and held a Fulbright scholarship at the Universität Tübingen in Germany.  Rita Dove, a Brief Biography , http://people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/

BULLETIN

Diane di Prima

It is happening even as you read this page.
By the time you finish reading this it will be over.

She will have left the hotel and disappeared.
He will have eaten the pills.
That one will slip and crack her skull on the floor.
That one will go out in a driveby shooting.

halfway around the world the bombs are dropping

As you read these words it is already too late.
200,000 children will have starved.
One of them held the Jewel in his brain,
another could cure plagues with her breath.

As you read this line one thousand have died of AIDS.

They die alone hidden in furnished rooms.
They die on the ground all over Africa.

halfway around the world the bombs are falling

Do not think to correct this by refusing to read.

It happens as you put down the paper, head for the door.

The ozone reaches the point of no-return

the butterflies bellyflop, the last firefly, etc.

Do not think to correct this by reading.

The bombs burst the small skull of an Arab infant
the silky black hair is stuck to your hands with brains. W/bits of blood.
There is less shrieking than you would expect a soft silence.
The silence of the poor, those who could not afford to leave.
Drop flowers on them from your mind, why don't you?
"I guess we'll have to stay and take our chances."

They die so silently even as we speak

Black eyes of children seek eyes of the dying mother

bricks fall dirt spurts like fountains in the streets.

In the time you fill a cup they die of thirst.

In the time it takes to turn off the radio.

Not past, not future

The huts are blazing now.
South of Market a woman ODs with an elegant sigh.
No more no less than is needed.

halfway around the world the bombs are dropping

Source
All poetry at Poets against War, http://www.poetsagainstwar.com/chapbook.asp#Le%20Guin