Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Gregg Mosson
30 years old
A World Without Picasso's Guernica
At the United Nations, blue drapes sheath a tapestry rendition of Guernica, so speakers can paint other dreams. People need to forget the screams— sewn and aired—so killing machines can work again.
Who expunged Guernica from the U.N.? And then, did U.N. walls tremble down to their foundation in the blood flood of the colliding twentieth century?
Is a distended Hitler laughing somewhere as phantom Luftwaffen blitzkrieg toward a blue-green sunset?
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell pontificated from a blue stage about the rights of man to enforce the law that triggers war.
Yesterday, today, or tomorrow; bombs drop and discombobulated body parts hurl through the air, and brown limbs burst off horses and spin past a still-standing bystander, dumbstruck and still looking, as infernos smoke and buildings crumble.
Meditation on Washington D.C. in April 2003
During the war, winter thawed in a rapid of hot and cold days, disarming us with a tempest of wind, lull, and rain: Walking to work in a wetness of caves, talking of war in flash fountains of sun, greens filled the trees like so many birds; birds will perch soon like so many buds; they will sing the ever-fresh song.
So this land filled with its own sunrise— petaled origami of purple, a dogwood painter’s-brush of white—and people entered the landscape as days grew longer, spring misted toward summer, and sun suckled life; yet in Iraq where battles were “victorious,” already blazed summer, crisping cities and deserts a-swirl with rumor, wind, dust-ups and explosions.
All April thin winds slipped around dogwoods and spread ribbons of coolness upon the blooming reminding that winter still kernelled in wind and soil; newspapers in metal boxes tolled destruction; people on their free day pursued their peace or pleasure, goals or strife, and May's reborn.
I crouch down to a white chrysanthemum and note how underground rivers purl the whole globe, where history's hands too are weavers in the roots and only spring's return reveals each cycle's results. A fuzzy, cream sweetness tickles my nose. Flowers leap into wide, drinking eyes.
Shall the Iraq war retreat to history books, like a nightmare enters language to be soothed when told? Or does time teach a lesson other than hope? How do we recognize when a new history begins, like an infant mewling a preface to dialogue, or juggernaut’s urge?
