Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Allan Johnston
59 years old
Born in California, I now live near Chicago and teach at Columbia College and DePaul University. I have published work in Poetry, Poetry East, Rhino, Rattle, and many other journals, and had one book published, Tasks of Survival (1995). Among other awards I have received a finalist fellowship in poetry from the Illinois Arts Council
Meditation on Bliss
Meditation on Bliss “Why write about bliss? There’s a war on!”
War was invented by the flowers, as the English and Aztec knew. Lavenders attacked jacarandas with luscious scents and iodine. Soon the rhododendrons learned to poison the earth by opening blossoming empires of color. The bees made golden by pollen produced the honey that drove the foraging Macedonians mad in Alexander’s campaign. Then petals fell in legion; soon there were just the endless acts of blossoming holding the flowery world together. Bliss exists outside of time; it lives in eternal moments inside and outside of war. It knows the bloom of dust borne up by the bullet that misses its mark, and leaps in joy as the target stumbles beyond the sights. It is one and is always winning. It only demands complete surrender.
War is Opened
It happens like this almost every time. One thing, another; descent into reverie after the panic. Train cars break up in the slow-motion sun-colored ochre under standards that defy the brightness of logic. “War is opened,” the headlines read.
Meanwhile, the ebullience of litter spills from cardboard in every garbaged bog of alley, and the electric neon nervosity of it rings the paths of felines that seek understanding or at least discarded heads of fish.
In these messages bearing the mess of post-deconstruction, any Burning Bush is God. Then the mailman discounts the whom on the brick-curbed, weather-stained letter from all that can be granted to power or at least the firmness of the cigarette.
War is opened on grammaticity, sign of the times, the cleanly concocted and clearly depersonalized zone of the poet, as if all advertisement were schmaltz instead of negation of the unwanted. Was there a square bit of form shining forth?
Define it by number. Hence a logic of meter, the scantron of art we can under- take or at least -stand, since declaration defines us and anyway here we are with cats that at least know what they’re after among the backdoor discardings of flowers.
