…except that blood tends to obliterate words.
(The Poem in Time of War by Sherman Pearl)
Visiting from out of town
a local overhears
the reason I am here.
She asks so you’re a poet?
This statement never fails to stymie me.
I do my best to respond,
eeking out the correct gradient of humility.
Unimpressed with my self-involved stammer
she generously remarks
…but everyone’s a poet, right?
I know the polite reply
is benevolent laugh,
easy approval
of this naive truism.
I don’t buy it.
Hitler may very well have written
love poems to Eva Braun,
precise in meter, correct Germanic syntax,
but that does not him a poet make.
Radovan Karadžić was published –
children’s poetry no less!
Not so good, I hear, but that matters little.
If there were an exclusive society of poets
he could be safely drummed out.
Though the poet’s tool
is pithy word use,
Dick Cheney’s retorts,
no matter how
pared past essentials,
could never
ever
constitute a poetic
element.
What then is a poet? What then is a poem?
Sherman Pearl says it is a brief on behalf of the living,
a paper megaphone for the voices of the dead.
I say a poet draws a line
with words & images & metaphors,
simile thrown in for good measure.
I say a poet creates possibility
with repetition, alliteration, rhythm.
A poet places a flower
in the rifle’s barrel.
Poets do not waterboard.
Some have been & always will be
soliders in war, but they do not wage war,
they do not rage war.
A poet whispers, states, screams
No more!
Never again!
Not in our name!
A poet may not always use facts,
but always tells the truth.
Poets craft word, after word, after chain of words,
as we step into night seeping around us,
our hearts pulsing crimson fists.
Poets offer what we have. No more, no less.
With uncertainty, out of dire need and with every intention
that no more blood flow in the streets,
that no more words be obliterated.
(cc) Karen G. Johnston
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