Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Joseph Gastiger
48 years old
DeKalb, IL
I am pastor of the First Congregational United Church of Christ here in DeKalb. I was led to the ministry, in part,in response to the slaughter of the first Gulf War. The poem I am submitting appeared in TriQuarterly #86, Winter 92-93.
Half an Hour Before the War
There in Mosul the coffee shop owner sat squinting morosely at dominoes, chiding the cook-- We can always buy diamonds just not any onions, just not any grapes. . .
The tech sergeant from Wichita couldn't decide how to break off her third letter– Tell Jeff I got the tapes, give him a kiss for me-- watching her silhouette toss every hiss of a lamp. . .
In Samarra, the imam stirred weak jasmine tea, nodding to the adamant whorls of the sura– When the sky splits asunder and reddens like a rose or stained leather, which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?
The lieutenant from Tempe unwrapped the St. Christopher medal his uncle had saved since Saipan– Tio Hector who'd still, at parades, weep for suicides washed up the beach. . .
While at Baghdad the new bride panted in the blue hotel, kneading this strange pair of shoulders gone slack at last– smeary with henna, lustrous seventeen years old half an hour before the war. . .
The airman from New Orleans who'd pinpoint that roof wasn't thinking of newsmen regretting collateral damage– he was dreaming some Sunday, beignets at the Cafe du Monde when his daughter had time. . .
And in Basra the shoe repairman, sadly, dreamt of shoes piled for mending– shoes left by cousins insulted he'd charge so much, shoes for the colonels whose errand boys never paid,
shoes of the amputees, the insane ones, the destroyed. But the worst of it nobody wanted to know– from the minefields and typhoidal trenches near Fao, a mountain of shoes. . .
Cascades of the Tigris collided below the gun turrets, behind the high-rises beside the mosques. Dry snow dusted down Quail Street in Albany Euclid Avenue, Cleveland streaking the dirty cars. . .
In the usual traffic flashing across bridges, flagmen waved on the hypothetical dead. . . Then came jets perforating radar– missiles stenciled with the names of girls– the gasworks going up– the door of fire–
the neighbor flying off a balcony in her first kiss of ozone– Then came the war. . .
Rules of War
RULES OF WAR
LONDON (AP) - U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair's personal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday.
Whose idea was it, riding an old woman?—
knotting the oily rags at her throat, kicking her ribs till she understood
Around and around, for as long as I like you’re mine to fuck with.
Was it some altar boy from St. Camillus, sick of horseflies and the odor of grease?—
brothers of nurses—kids from a trailer park I go right past?
(Even with sisters egging him on, it was a man’s idea. No one can doubt this.)
Why would your cousin’s son, dead set on dental school, beat up a grandmother?
Because the coal fields of West Virginia sometimes burn with a fire you can’t see.
Because, in the deepest well of a dream few can remember, none will admit
where a child is forced to lie down in his own filth—
where sounds won’t carry and welts won’t show—
where that retarded neighbor girl’s stripped bare and raped—
because they could.
What Comes After
WHAT COMES AFTER
Despair writes no sutra, no psalm. It’s no music you’ve heard, not even if prisoners were compelled to build terrible orchestras out of car parts, broken windows and organ meats. It’s the odor of carrion, all the same. It’s the color of broth, all grease and bonemeal, poured out of slop buckets and sucked into stony soil. Where it can’t be atoned for, even grieved, before it taints the weedy earth. Because, really, the girl wasn’t Shia, or Sunni. Because the girl was simply a girl, and they cut off her head with a carpenter’s saw. To her slender neck, God-only-knows sewed the head of a stray dog. And what comes after that? Not music. No metaphor. No press secretary’s small cough. They sewed it with baling wire, I think. The hands of the boy tumbled beside her were bolted together in someone’s machine shop. If there’s even a God for that kind of cruelty, what does it want?
