Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.

Rodger Moody

58 years old

Rodger Moody is the founding editor of Silverfish Review Press. His poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Caliban, upstreet, Indiana Review, Small Farmer’s Journal, and the July/August 2008 issue of the online magazine, The Northern Agrarian Monthly. New work is forthcoming in Eclipse and Dislocate Literary Journal. A chapbook, Unbending Intent, was  published by 26 Books (Portland, Oregon, 1997). He has made his living as a warehouse worker for the last twenty-three years.

Entering High School / Williamsport, Indiana, 1964

No one in my family
had finished high school,
when I was tagged
a flunky, it went unnoticed.

At the end of my eighth grade
year I was earmarked for the
steel mill; the subjects the
principle told me I’d take:

freshman Wood Shop, General Math,
Biology II for dummies; a retired marine,
he didn’t bother to ask.
During study hall I un-

covered secret layers
asleep beneath my skin,
all the plastic unexplored spaces
rolled out onto the table. I became

the lover of names. I
nurtured ways to make a girl
laugh out loud, traded a rabbit’s
foot for a pinkie cheater.

“But you will be drafted,” said father,
“so why think of anything else?”

The New Military, 2008 / after Kipling

“If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied”

I was the first on my father’s side 
to go to college, second on my mother’s.

Her brother went first but was drafted. 
“There’s a bullet with your name on it,”

is all his father had to say. Which song
will our daughters sing tonight?

At Every Turn / Terre Haute, Indiana, 1971

An older college freshman
I typed term papers
with a Royal manual
on onion skin paper.
A prof’s nightmare,
the provincial who believed
grammar only got in the way.
My supple mind folded
around drink and smoke.
Nixon held the
country in a narrow
box--                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    language was the thing I
could use to breathe
music into my days. Vietnam
had been waved in my sad face,
testimony to what I was
expected to become. A thought
tethered to a string.

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