Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Patricia Fargnoli
65 years old
NH
A retired psychotherapist, I teach poetry and am on the NH Art's Council Touring Roster. My book, Necessary Light, won the 1999 May Swenson book award, and I've been widely published: Poetry, Ploughshares, Nimrod et al.
In an American Village
Bombers are cutting through the cloudless-- noses pointed and teeth. We scuttle into buildings like hollow boxes or cartons with all adornment cut away. I huddle in an interior corridor. Bombs and shouts--something explodes people running--I run also. The next building will be safe, another floor, under the stairs, a closet, a corner. The planes have landed; soldiers enter, search. Ugly faces, no compromise in them. The crows have flown We are all that is left-- gray people running and hiding.
Olive uniforms of the military--thunder of steps in the unfurnished boxes-- nowhere they will not find me-- Awake, I shake pain from my wrist, head for the bathroom. It’s the novel’s fault. Egypt --its old history, or Nadia’s letter, Ramallah, the tanks. Hearts that kill one another. A friend tells me he was expert in knife-work-- Nam, Cambodia--my body contracts; a darkness inside-- a bag I do not open. Flowers, if only there were gardens in the dream. If only soft furniture in the hard houses.
Richford, 1945
All that summer after my mother died, in our grandmother’s house, mostly silence and the aunts wandering from room to room anointing mahogany tables with the torn lemon-oiled sheets as if everything murky could be rubbed to a glow, the war news scrubbed from our parlor.
Mornings, banished to the sun porch, we shone as well, side by side in our brother/sister play suits, your cowlick slicked down, my braids bowed with blue grosgrain.
On the long window bench in that hothouse of glass walls and light fractured by Japanese wind chimes, we sat, neat as bisque ornaments, our hearts more confined than the canaries in their white cages.
But afternoons we played war. Scrubbing garden dirt into cheeks and arms, we darted from willow to forsythia as if within such shelter, we could become invisible.
You always found me, wrestled me down, your weight, the first warm imprint of love on my body. We made guns of our hands and taught each other the right way to die, plummeting to the moist earth, rolling over and over, ecstatic and bellied up to a fire storm sun.
Syllabics for the Second Anniversary
This one’s from below and the smoke spumes toward the clear blue that is the sky two planes just broke open on their deadly mission two years past, and already everything has been written, the fifteen thousand poems to make sense, of what cannot be made sense of, what still burns inside us and is senseless.
Today, in Keene New Hampshire the college students are lounging on redwood benches on Appian Way, bookbags dropped on the walk beside them. Someone throws a frisbee, someone catches. The wide dormitory windows are open and no one’s afraid, though they’d better be, of what might drift in.
The Bird Wounded by an Arrow
The Bird Wounded by an Arrow (L’oiseau blessé d’une flêche)
Even he sings-- though it may be a song of pain. A man with a bow and arrow bent on killing is a diminished thing. A bird with an arrow in its side is a sad bird indeed. What does it matter that the bird flew in the way of the arrow, or that the man became indentured to his bow, or that the bow was handed down to him from his father. Too many countries these days are killing each other; Too many pain songs bleed into the earth.
Quotitian Poem
Quotidian Poem
When I heard the bombing had begun I drove down to Keene and bought a 3x magnifying glass, a sketch book and drawing pencils. Then, I went out behind the apartments to snap off seed pods, weeds I could not name and a couple of brittle leaves. I saved the afternoon by studying edges of petals, seeds, the marvelous veins and sketching them. On the page, I wrote: unknown weeds 10/7/01, found in the patch between Applewood and the Historical Museum; on the day we began bombing. Then I made a pot of soup out of black-eyed peas and a ham bone I'd frozen from Easter. I threw in onions, garlic, parsley, cumin a couple of tomatoes-- whatever made sense. Enough for an army.
For My Friend Who Writes on the Floor of Her Corridor in Ramallah
For My Friend Who Writes on the Floor of her Corridor in Ramallah
Nadia, I write from the living room of my two room senior citizen’s apartment, from my computer which can send these words to you if you still have electricity; if you are still safe. I haven’t heard from you for days. Your last poem sent the tanks rumbling through my spring also, though the maples out back fill with the mating calls of returning birds and feral cats, eyes alert but untroubled, sit quietly by the rhododendron.
Someone, a man, said to me the other day, what if the women banded together and refused to let the fighting go on? All the women, he meant, all of us. I am tired. I know I am waiting for something to happen here that will make me as afraid as you are. When? What?
Nadia, my daughter-in-law’s belly curves with their first child, At Easter yesterday, my grandson has shot up three inches since Christmas. Next week he leaves for basic in Texas. You write of the naked boy dead under the soldier’s boot-- he has the face of my grandson.
The shouts in your streets; the prayer muzzein’s calls, drone of the Apache helicopters, I can almost hear them. Last week, a man you knew here was arrested for pulling a knife on his woman. He seemed such a mild man. Nadia, Nadia, we are too old for this aren’t we? Must it be eye for an eye for an eye until there are no eyes left?
