War Bird: A Journal
Poets' Anti-War Rally, 12 Feb. 2003
The massed and pillared wings of
the White House never fly—
whitewashed yearly, they stand
impervious
to metaphor,
to hawk and dove, and red armies
of ants. Only the halting squirrels
investigate, creeping past the arrowhead
gates to scratch
the Midas lawns
for treasure—On the street, commentators
wander like boys in a story too simple
to explain. The political message,
a hat
punched inside out:
once, the Nazis got word that Churchill
would visit Roosevelt "in Casa Blanca":
U-Boats bobbed near the Potomac,
waiting for him...
but Churchill,
as he said, was sailing to Morocco.
Reagan protesters splashed the Pentagon
walls daily with cow blood—
soldiers waxed
the plaster, and triremes
of rats licked the bloody grass;
the EPA sent health goons to stomp
them, and the pacifists, away—
Then rats stormed
the National Zoo:
urbane, patient inheritors of the earth,
they snapped prairie dogs like wishbones;
vigilante zookeepers laced the ground
with poison,
Carthage delenda est,
and killed the hippo. (Here, in the
New World Order, penguin and polar bear
soak up ozone, and Nation shall
beat them both
into ploughshares....)
Hawks and fat cats disdained
the White House squirrels, their proconsul
Chevy Suburban nosed us aside:
we spoke
against the war,
and for the cameras, spelled our names
on Chinese Radio—Elder poets shrewdly
loitered at the lobbiest bar,
read first,
then left us
to the falange of Secret Servicemen,
chatting like critics into their black
lapels at every bungled line:
this was no
singing school,
no falcon heard our crows and warbles...
Emily, our modest leader, rapped the gate:
"Mrs. Bush wanted American poems—
I brought
3,000,
all against the war. Can you take them?"
Gulping, the pimply guard asked his shirt
for help; older hands hustled up,
"The Great Oz
cannot see you..." etc.
Will four and twenty blackbirds fill
a cowboy hat? Bunkered belowdecks,
the President goes for the burn,
racing the
cut tongue
of his treadmill to a dead heat.
Even Nixon met the enemy once,
strode with his staff into a red sea
of hippies—
they didn't part,
and he burbled about baseball...
from his desk, he liked to watch
the sightseers through a gap
in the hedges;
peaceniks
learned this and blocked his view,
stood there day and night for years:
Nixon, nightmare reality shanking
through his eyes,
knelt with Kissinger:
Henry, he moaned, what do they want?....
Days from now, how many days,
the Valentine "Woo at the Zoo" begins.
A hand-raised
falcon bows,
and shares meat with its master....
He bows in turn, and eats;
both softly whisper ee-chu,
ee-chu,
a duet
heard only on abstract and crumbling
cliffs—if a man were to stand or
sing there, he'd fall. The master
straps on a
a falcon feathered
courtesan's hat and turns away—
Flapping wildly, the falcon claws
the head-shape, squawking,
gyrating to
hold on,
imperial lunge and lunge,
biting at the skull it fed, as
semen slowly drips into a
rubber dam.
David Gewanter, "War Bird: A Journal" from Beltway magazine. Copyright © 2006 by David Gewanter. Reprinted by permission of Beltway magazine.
Source:
2006
