NaPoWriMo 2 - Article Erasure

Process notes:
This article on NPR got me thinking about peace and democracy. Does democracy promote military action? Is “peace and democracy” an oxymoron? Aside from the parenthetical addition to the last stanza, all of the words below came from the article. I cut and pasted it into a document and deleted words in “erasure” fashion. All but the last four lines occur in the order they appear in the document.

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demoxymoron

It's no surprise
pockets of protest
challenge President Bashar Assad.

Alarm bells in Washington punch.

The situation is threatening
to unravel intricate
relations with allies and foes.

Strategic setbacks
usher in the unknown.
Tensions bind freedom and reform.
Uprisings press an explosive gauntlet
as Syria’s military is still
on Assad’s side.

Syrian hands try
to manipulate America.
(consider Lybia)

We exile peace in democracy.


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Thank you to Writer's Island for providing a place to post every day this month, and always on Saturdays. Check out the participants at NaPoWriMo.

Call it war, it is what it is

Epicenters of uprisings
explore decimation,
plundered people scatter in panicked packs
some track flat beneath turreted tanks
ta tat - ta tat - ta tat tat - tattering torsos
to shreds of
all that used to be.

America,
we open our eyes
to sunshine and doughnuts
living every day
like nothing matters but Facebook.

Suffering superfluities Batman!
We oughta get outta Afghanistan!
Lybia shmybia shimmering glimmia
“It’s not an Iraq, It’s not an Afghanistan.”
What is it then,
a sparkling jewel?

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Process Notes: Listening to the news, I noticed how they cleanse language to conceal the horror of war, rendering it benign. When discussing the uprising in Lybia, the American news referred to “epicenters of uprisings.” This poem was born from that phrase. Disclaimer: I know a lot of Americans live their lives for more than facebook.

linguistic genocide attempt

Languages die beneath tongues silenced
in schools designed to transform little Indians
into assimilated copies of the dutiful US.

The great white father molded death
with agrarian paradigms
and words shoved down throats.
God the Father, household tasks and
and shut your dirty Indian mouth
covered the curriculum.

One weekend per month at home
sent Cheyenne syllables swirling silently
through Tongue River eddies.

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I wrote this in response to the chapter on language in "We the Northern Cheyenne People," written at Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, Montana. The chapter reports that in 2007, the youngest person who spoke fluent Cheyenne was 45 years old.

If you happen to visit, I miss you my poet friends. When my college class is over in mid December, I'll be back with greater regularity.

The Unfinished Marker

Deep on Chameleon Street
beneath a canopy of trees
children free dandelion seeds
in a fierce stampede of feet.
The little parachutes mirror dust
that bedecks the air.

Steel songs ring from
a chisel’s slippery slope and
collide with the liquid trill
of two wood thrush volleying
a back and forth dance
of voice blending into din.

White flecks fling as a steel point
uncovers an angel hidden in stone.
Up, from alabaster flesh it rises.
One eye surveys the tapestry it joins
to commemorate the soldiers
who pain our nation's soul.

Its wings linger inside calcite
waiting to be chiseled into being.

Soldiers and Cicadas: A Sestina

Good intentions pave roads to hell.
Tactical maneuvers force soldiers
to stifle--to suppress the enemy’s voice.
Sucking sap through tree roots
cicadas that spent seventeen years under ground,
emerge and transform--sprouting wings.

High in the branches of ironwood trees, villagers wish for wings
to lift them from the gaping mouth of hell.
After seventeen years waiting under ground
a million cicadas pulse out yearning, over soldiers
screaming to be heard, tripping over ironwood roots--
cicadas, explosions, and wishes--one screaming voice.

His mother’s storyteller voice
drew parallels between the cicada’s sprouting wings
and the wings yet to come from Aoul’s violent roots
germinated after the last cicada hell-
when his mother rose and fell against a soldier’s
hips grinding hers into the ground.

Every night Aoul sleeps on the ground.
Every night he hears his mother’s voice
crying out against the soldiers
crying out for angel’s wings.
She’s seen all she wants of hell.
She receives no nourishment from roots.

Save his mother, Aoul knows no roots.
Although, through men on the ground
his father’s hell
shares its voice.
Aoul stands to raise his wings
He stands against and for the soldiers.

His father, his mother, cicadas, and soldiers--
ashes to ashes to ashes to roots
bullets, grenades, and wings
he steps from the branch and flies to the ground
giving his voice
to hell.

Soldiers kick the boy’s lifeless body across the ground
into the ironwood roots that sustain the mating voice
of the cicadas, whose wings fan the gates of hell.