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

Renny Christopher

52 years old

My blog, "A Carpenter's Daughter," can be found at: www.rennychristopher.blogspot.com

Mutanabi Street Book Mart Bombing, Baghdad, 3/5/07

“Iraqis have long had a reputation as the Middle East’s bibliophiles.”
--Los Angeles Times

Gently, in a stately, dignified manner, pages fall from the sky
disarticulated from books the way that limbs have been severed
from bodies. A car repurposed as a bomb smolders in the street
in front of what had been lively arguments over values and prices.
The people gathered in Mutanabi Street came for love of books;
books are the opposite of death. Only the ideas on the pages should
fly. Metaphor should not become fact, pages flying up, coming down
on the bodies of the killed and wounded, blood and ink smearing.

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