Poetry and Art

Symbology minus one

Symbology minus one
Do poems wait to be written?
May they never be written, never read?
Paper sheets,
thick and rich like the top-of-the-cream
in bottles from a mythic past,
drift down through the smoky air
in a room with reverberating rebar
and condemned concrete.

Thoughts that once filled this air
now sprawl
limp and unmoving.
Dreams of last night
that have no more doors.
Unfinished ice water slowly regains
ambience on the floor
as the unfilled paper floats down
to sop it up like so much gauze.

Will there ever be enough gauze to fill wounds
ever enough poets screaming and chanting their verse
ever enough time to escape the decimations of the past.

Metal flying through the sky is unusual.
Civilian deaths are not.
But they are connected.
As one splash of red
is tagged across pummeled shards of white
through which appear the depths of skies blue.

Crop circles are forming spontaneously.
The SUV is proclaimed more valuable than human life.
The atom bomb is declared a weapon of choice
and torture is finally enshrined in legal prevarications.

Stranger things have happened.
What is made by people
comes back to people,
like metal flying through the air,
like paper floating up and then drifting down
like poems never written,
stopped and strangled,
disappearing in the bitter smoke.

By Gregory Sotir

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND???

You’re out of your mind!
Lies have been built
Upon lie after lie,
Throughout and throughout
Decades of time,
Layered on thick
So the students are tricked
In to…
Never  asking  “why?”
Because
Keep them illiterate
Masterfully keeps them ignorant.
Keep the same kids growing up to write the history books
Keeps the same master narrative, where:
Whites write what’s right.
Frederick Douglass wrote his own narrative, as a slave
But taught himself how to read, to stand a chance in the game
A game that’s still being played!
“No child left behind”
Sounds so nice,
Sorta like “liberating Iraq”
It’s just another manipulation device.
Label the schools failing
Label Iraqis terrorists
Sugar coated fear candy
It’s the greatest!
Kids eat it up,
And so do adults
I’ve had enough,
Watching the world overdose
On empty slogans and phrases, promises not kept
Then forgotten about, just because he’s our president.
But we won’t forget!
And we’ll call him out!
Where are our children?
And what’s today’s “education” really about?
Robot teachers?
Standardized minds?
I don’t want to be afraid of what I see
When I fast-forward time!
I want to see fists in the air,
I want to change my rhymes!
But in the meantime, we must shout,

“NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND?
YOU’RE OUT OF YOUR MIND!

--Ashley Stanfield

ANGEL

That's my name. I'll tell you something
my mother doesn't know about me: the stone
she thought was a pet rock she nearly threw away
is still in the top drawer rolled inside a sock. It's
the rock from the earth of my native homeland
Valle de Guadalupe, a little coastal town in
the proud state of Jalisco. I took it from a topmost
cliff as a symbol of my life, climbing higher,
as our family left their joblessness, their poverty,
and hired a coyote to take me, my two year-old
brother Francisco, and my pregnant mother
across the border, passing like dark skiffs through
the outskirts of Tijuana.

For years now in this country, my parents have labored
for minimum wage, yet grateful for work,
dragging themselves home from the night to feed us
then soon asleep to beat the sun to the morning
I went to school, but knowing only the words of my country,
I didn't do well. I stumbled through English, and
when the words failed, my grades fell.

When I graduated with Cs I knew I'd never get to
college, a dream of my parents that became my dream too.
So when a recruiter from the marines approached me, and told me
that he knew my parents were "illegals" and that he
could offer me citizenship and a way to get into college,
I felt that my only choice was enlistment.

I joined the marines July 2003 and left for Iraq right after boot camp.
Today, two years later, and after returning from the war,
I've come here to the immigration office.

My mother helps me with my hand sunk deep
into the wheelchair. She works it to the side of the helmet
covering the screws and bolts protecting my brain.
The man in the suit is mumbling some words.
She sets my hand back down into my lap
then helps me raise my left hand instead
the one I can hold up myself.

"I do," prompts my mother into my ear,
staying close beside me. I say that. I say, "I do,"
while my mother leans over the chair
clasping my hand. "Es el juramento te prometides,
It's the oath you were promised,"
she assures me, her voice quivering, as she
presses her lips to my cheek. In a moment,
the ceremony ends. A different life begins,
one absent the promises of words.

-Glen Marcus

To The Recruiters on Campus

Don't come around my student
with sweet talk about GI Bills,
comfortable military housing,
benefits for his immediate family,
or guaranteed U.S. citizenship
until you've told him the other facts first

Tell him about running into what seems
like an abandoned building
then hearing an explosion
that sends him flying 200 feet

Tell him about the fingers,
hands, arms, legs,
that might be blown off

Tell him about the friend from boot camp
that he might lose

Tell him he might be made a scapegoat
so that a superior can get away
with military crimes

Tell him that he won't be working in America
tell him he'll be hated on foreign soil
tell him he'll be a moving target;
a bull's-eye tattooed across his heart...
come clean so he knows
he might not make it back home

Show him pictures of the devastation,
voting booths and innocent people blown to bits
include that in your pamphlets
so he knows the extent of the sacrifice
before you ask him to sign

The following poem by Chicana San Diego public school teacher and artist Marissa Raigoza appears in the current issue of COMD's DraftNOtices. Other articles from the issue are available at Rick Jankow's Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft website.

U nilateral and militaristic, ours is a
N ation that digs unjustly
I nto students’ private records
T hrough our unfortunately over-trusted
E ducation system, using vile methods of military recruiting, thus
D emoralizing the knowledgeable culture. Yet this country is titled
S ole superpower of the sadly
T hanatophobic world that is filled with powerful nations that
A llow the genocide of the weak and innocent for their own
T emporary, superficial and petrochemical pillage-based
E conomic growths. As the people of our country remain in torpor,
S entences taught to their children in schools are of death rather than words.

Amber A. R. Khan
Age 15; Spring, TX

The first man I killed was small and
hidden in the tall grass.

Being a killer forever changes you.
Even if you learn to be kind and considerate and civilized
that part of you is always
hiding down inside
awaiting a chance.

A normal person does not want to kill and
will avoid it at all costs.
The military won't let you remain normal.
It doesn't matter if you think
you are smart enough
not to get caught up in their lies.
They will change you.

Don't be sucked into the biggest myth and lie
that dying for your country is somehow heroic

Really be all that you can be

~~by Larry Kerschner a 60-year-old Viet Nam Vet

FIGHT!

They tell me, “Fight for your country it’s your American task”,

 sending me to fight this war and I didn’t even ask.

Cut me from the system, shape me, deny me my existence and waste me,

But I wont be afraid try me, I wont be unmade deny me 

When they send me to this battle, they won’t think of me again,

but what about the people who love me, my family and friends.

Cut me from the system, shape me, deny me my existence and waste me,

but I wont be afraid try me, I wont be unmade deny me

I don’t even have a face, when I’m sent over enemy lines,

sent to fight for something I don’t stand for, a battle that isn’t mine.

Cut me from the system shape me, deny me my existence and waste me,

but I wont be afraid try me, I wont be unmade deny me.

This is not my war why should I have to fight?

There’s something wrong about this something isn’t right.

Cut me from the system shape me, deny me my existence and waste me,

but I wont be afraid try me, I wont be unmade deny me.

Why should I have to see men die in battle?

Killed like there nothing slaughtered like cattle.

Cut me from the system shape me, deny me my existence and waste me,

but I wont be afraid try me, I wont be unmade don’t deny me.

What will you give when part of me dies?

 When I found out I fought for secrets and your mountains of lies.

Cut me from the system shape me, deny me my existence and waste me,

but I wont be afraid try me, I wont be unmade don’t deny me.

They tell me, “Fight for your country it’s your American task”,

I rip up your draft letter and throw it in the trash.

Davinesha Sally

6-15-06

English Comp.

"Everything must change," the song says. But
why the strange alchemy of beach changed to
a graveyard? Why the mounds of sand cribbed
to a torso, marking plots in their narrow rows--
The white crosses like wings of gulls grounded,
the blood-colored flowers drying like tears, while
a sun surrenders at the feet of our silence.

"Everything must change," says the song, like
this man I saw smiling with his wife and child
as they walked the boardwalk moments earlier--
Now all three solemn before the weeping gulls,
masting their shadows above the memorial in
winged apparitions through misted ocean air.

The infant dunes make fallowed fields, and
the gusts of wind have severed the photographs,
yet here, the nameless are finally granted names.

Each Sunday the graveyard darkens like a cloud.
Each day gathers the dead, one two, three, more,
like slow steps taken down a treacherous road
of combat, sniper-fire, assassinations, car bombs,
to lie here in quiet solitude free of its pretense.

A man with an accent stops and stares toward sunset.
"There," he says, and points to an immeasurable distance.
"The graveyard would stretch as far as there. There!"
This man has changed. His voice now angrier, growing
bitter, darkening like the cloud and the graveyard.

"One cross for Iraq. One. What would it look like if
they truly named our people?" And with his words,
it's as if the long body of California Coast guilded into
a sinewy grief, an Ozymandian disaster filled with
might and despair. And again broods the refrain,
"Everything must change," except the desire to war.

--Grant Marcus

American Vendetta/The Terrorist Zaqawi

We know death. He's on the tube.
Woven into and between the crude commercials,
a thread, a phospheme, a subliminal, a shadow.
Eyes x'd out. Then explode.
The final stab of revenge.
Without end.
End.

Traveling along the sunny
bumpy springtime road, the thick leathery
olive green leaves lift and wave
and drop, hanging in the desert.
The radio headphones cut in and out,
waves of sound changing to static.
The buzzing revving roar of an engine
becomes crescendo racing whirring fast
behind us. Going where? Who knows? It's dim. It is all
Without end.
End.

I climb on my stickered bike.
I always wear black. My legs, my limbs, feel so tired,
sickened and deep. I can feel in them this dusty thirst.
I think it's normal for my age,
I think, sickened, deep. Tired
without end.
End.

Believe in normality?
I don't really care what you think. Normality?
I don't really care whether or not you have purpose.
But...our purpose is from God.
As God is and as time stains
without end.
End.

A man does many stupid things
He acts only often in reaction.
Problems get bigger and bigger
Then a bomb falls onto his house ,
and another bomb falls onto his house.
Two bombs in one day! Now revenge
knows death. It happens a mile away,
and it happens twenty miles away,
a hundred miles away, a thousand miles away...
without end.
End.

I climb on my battered bike.
and ride far along the depopulated coastline.
Without safety I still have the faith of the living.
The coast that goes on and on
night-sky blue water and sand,
without end.
End.

By Gregory Sotir