Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Martha Duncan
57 years old
Martha Duncan is a writer and workshop facilitator. She has worked for creative change through innovative social service projects for 25 years. Her writing has appeared in The Night House Anthology, I Thought My Father Was God, The Change Agent, and other publications. Two of her poems have been accepted by Puckerbrush Review, and two short prose pieces will appear in Volume II of The Aputamkon Review.
Listen
Listen for Grace Paley
The crows shriek, their criss-cross throwing shadows. One cloud floats over the woods. The field of weeds, its Butter-and-Eggs and Pearly Everlasting, full circle of white tops, moves from light to dark in sun and lifting breeze.
Through trees coos and caws as the neighbors’ boys rake their trikes over the gravel. A woodpecker taps loudly at a bare birch.
I wonder how this place can exist when places I cannot hear or see explode and mothers can no longer pat the tall shoulders of their sacrificed sons.
The first drops spread spots on the bulkhead. I walk back over the path in the pause before the pounding that only the growling moan of the wind can rise above.
Inside the house I can’t close up and just do the grocery list. A soldier in Iraq is saying he adopted a pregnant cat, put her dead kitten out to burn, the way he expects to go himself.
I have to stand by the radio forgetting where I put my coffee cup, my hand on the dial, listening till the end or until the storm takes the power out.
Climate Change
Climate Change
Blizzards built snow mountains I couldn’t climb without falling on my hands, staring at
blue light inside white holes. Then January, like summer, thunder shook the inside doors.
Bright, quick lightning grazed me at the kitchen sink. Outside icicles dropped, exploding.
On the news, My Lai remembered: the mother from New Goshen, Indiana, says she
gave them a good boy. They sent her back a murderer. The mother in Baghdad
tries to kiss the soldiers’ feet. The soldier says in the telling, “I don’t speak Arabic, but
I can speak Human.” Morning, on the bird feeder crowned with the shape of a white sultan’s turban,
the grosbeak stands, his coral feathers bleeding into the black of his wings, the white
stripes like snow that sticks as the wind trims the drifts. He stretches up, out. Below him
silver chunks of birches, cut and fallen, shed melting snow. The mountain leaves a wet spot.
May, at work, I fall on my face in the parking lot, get up, mouth full of grit.
I feel drenched with death, and memories of love fall through me like rain.
Night, at the window, I hear rain filling the warm mouth of the earth.
