[Newspoetry] [Peace] Sat. 3-15 Anti-War Plans for Fun & Safety (fwd)

[Donald L Emerick]

Rally Round A Flag, Boys'n'Girls

This note is a little late for reply,
but I can rally anyway, at home.
against a distant war come home,
a distant war that makes no homes,
a distance war takes from homes
the living, as wounded and dead:
war desecrates living in all bodies.

I was thinking, in silent sadness,
of full-bodied bloody awful costs
of all this gringo war-mongering,
about how much good we forego,
when we are blinded by warriors,
when we dwell in darkest fears
that lives have become sacrifices
to some great and terrible gods
who scale their power calculates
against one another, ruthlessly,
to prove whose ways are better.

We could be ending hunger, or
we could be sewing clothes, or
we could be finding shelter, or
we could be outwork poverty, or
we could be making green peace,
we could be painting, singing,
laughing, dancing, loving, joking,
reading, writing and composing,
parsing poems, telling tall tales
about a beauty we truly sense
only from a distance, far places
that we neither possess nor own
as beauty is some common good,
something we can not appropriate,
something we may never conquer.

Beauty is unscarred public space,
a place that has no tragic wounds,
when staunch allies of blood flows
seek to conceal their own weapons,
not in a frail flesh of our fresh bodies,
but bury them deeper than plowshares,
to let them rust away, unoiled, unused,
unneeded, unheeded, best forgotten,
best not for getting your way anyway
by getting in the way of some beauty.

Beauty is a precious public good
whose peace is timeless serenity
untroubled by enforced violations,
of violent savage who ravages nature,
like some dog gone mad by disease,
by indisposition, rotten unhealthiness
whose ills would fester and spread,
wild-firing plagues in fevered bodies,
taking away vitality, life, or beauty,
and leaving nothing but dust heaps,
higher than seas of dust collected
in millions of years on a far Moon.

Then in blood shall our Moon shine,
our skies morning and night redden,
our middays like our midnites dark,
under ash, in pot ash, Wednesday,
global clouds would cast shadows
that can not be seen in failing light,
in darkness all distance disappears,
our beauty is no longer to be seen.

Fear eats away at the hope of man,
it eats like cancer, eats cell by cell,
takes over vulnerable flesh organs,
robs them of their function and use,
spreads like a shadow over peace,
devours what it slowly feeds upon,
corruption comes from deep within,
a possibility of good gone wrong,
gone gravely wrong, to early grave,
too early to grieve in burial mounds.

We might have had it all, back then,
by not having it all, not all our way,
by having it the way you have space
between things that matter in each,
between things inseparably distant
when contact means talk-to-meet
at fringes edging our united nations,
when contact is not prelude to war,
started by nation united in a stand
against all others in understanding
as hasty initiates trigger sequences.

The hatefulness of a hurtfulness
that cares not for here and now,
which fears this here and now,
as a false moment, a false light, 
administers to us its halcyonide,
pacifying us, magnifying threats
more distant than fair far beauty,
beyond thresholds of reason,
beyond limits of common sense,
by talking in top-secret summits,
in secret tongues of secret agents,
more alien than foreign languages,
in secret concealing dark secrets,
fell plans against faint life and limb.

I rally, here and now, home alone,
I rally round token flags of peace,
I rally with my distant friends around
soi-distant ideas of being far friends,
more distant than Moons and Stars,
but seen, as beauty, being out there,
sensed without shadows, heart-felt,
heart-throbs, pumping blood on,
not pumping it up, like oil in sands,
but moving it on in closed cycles,
closing cycles to wounding leaks.

Thanks for listening,
may you be taking some joy,
despite this lamenting,
by remembering what we do,
when we are dissenting
we lose our way to consenting
as adults to our common case,
our public face, one we put on,
and ones we should put off.
Donald L Emerick

(If I hosted a talk-radio show,
you could listen to me all day,
but not question a word, I say,
and yet still have time to pray
that the liberals do not know
anything as you hate them so.

Fear, and its closest ally, hate
never come to prisoned doubt,
for their surety of truth is out
sprouting rumor; in-mouths pout
like fruitless weed, grows up late
yet wins by overwhelming fate.)