Rosa del Mar

Apolitical Poem by Apolitical Poet

I don't do politics nor discuss war

in poetry, it all being somewhere beyond the

front line of my experience and too

complicated for the mind that resides

inside its bony shell. Make no mistake--

I do not ignore events nor their

catalysts and proponents, but often the components

are so remote as to buffer me

from them as on September 11th.

*

Of course, I was moved as you, but little ink

spilled from my pen in response to that day.

Anything I would have had to say would have cheapened

it like the over-night flag shortage and the

prophets made thereof. I saw the faces powdered

in cement and the eyes that stared out, the tears

that washed rivers over cheeks, the people running and replays

of the second jet knifing the other twin, the

bodies falling from windows tens of stories

up in the towers that shortly plummeted

into a city of rubble dubbed Ground Zero,

and the dragon's smoking breath under which disappeared

Manhattan. I wasn't there, but here, 1000 miles from the

screams and heat and panicked feet, safely in front of a TV screen, watching

as if it were a movie. It shocked but not surprised.

Many said we had it coming--bad foreign policy and

White House chess players meddling in someone else's

game. Isn't it always the pawns that are

expendable? The victims' crime: being

on the board in their respective places and on time.

Ink was shed, more than I can remember on any other

event, more flags sold and flown as if latent patriotism were the answer

and Amercanism were the power-of-the-hour.

*

Nearly a year later, Dave--a retired state trooper--says

he collects abandoned flags from off the sides of Georgia-to-Florida

highways, flags that flew loose--from cars, trucks, vans, SUVs, motorcycles

and perhaps mopeds--to lie like the rubbish we've accustomed ourselves

to not seeing.

*

No, I don't do politics in poems,

I don't wordify man's inhumanity to men, women, children;

woman's inhumanity to women, children, men;

child's inhumanity to children, men, women;

my inhumanity to you, nor

yours to me.

What would it serve anyway? Certainly it won't go away

just because we wrote a bunch of poems. It's war!

War against all, all the time: war against the world, war against nature, war

against the universe for heaven's sake!

Don't expect me who's unworthy to stitch some neat personal philosophy into verse. I'm not

poet enough and some things can't be expressed in words. Go visit

Picasso's Guernica and see if it tells you

anything.