Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt
The Gods Went Out The Door
The Gods Went Out The Door
the gods went out the door tonight and not very quietly either
and they forgot to pull the door shut so the cold wind is blasting in from outside
and I can hear truck sounds, the squeal of tires, engine revs and boom boxes
and a woman’s scream from down the block finds its way in; her husband, a vet, is home drunk
and he is trying to convince her that he is a god and their little boy is crying in a back bedroom
and I can hear something else from very far away louder even than the man’s ugly bellowing
it is the shriek of rockets falling in Baghdad, Gaza, Beirut lighting the sky over an orchard where surprised bodies sprawl
it is a synagogue, a mosque erupting into flames it is the moon exploding like an iridescent warhead
100 megatons, 100 million tons of nuclear winter I hear it all, woman, man, child, rockets, moon
and now I hear the president on TV he’s wearing a turban, he thinks he is a prophet
I hear the bubbles of Coca-Cola in his glass the little grandiose thoughts fizzing up inside his head
I hear him think the words future, and futures I hear them mix with god and the price of oil in his brain
and everything on the planet is breaking up and the whole world’s voice is chattering like static
and I must hold myself, I must plug my ears to remember how warm it was, how quiet it pretended to be.
Dogwood
The following poem is from my chapbook The Land (Rattlesnake Press, 2007). I wrote it as we were gearing up for the “shock and awe” of the Iraq invasion. Today I read Seymour Hersh’s article “Shifting Targets” (October 9, 2007 New Yorker) about the Bush administration's plans for Iran: “’They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,’ one recently retired C.I.A. official said. ‘They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002’…” My poem suddenly seems sadly relevant again.
Dogwood, Spring, 2003
How to stay sane in such a heartbroken spring when the dogwood blossoms fly apart, a shrapnel of white petals, when bodies fester in a blistering dune far away and bread has run out and oil fires smolder, when the Archer shrouds his bowstring in a black cloud and hundreds of flares mimic lethal night suns, when lizards carry the only grains of news across vast deserts and stories creep like ants out of the scorched gardens.
You open your eyes to the morning brilliance and even the ordinary flowering of April seems like a lie by men in command, who manipulate the repulsive puppet strings of absolute power deep inside the earth, just as you feared.
