An imagistic statement on the condition of war and meltdown of the American Dream.
Stephen Oliver is the author of six major collections of poetry. His recent collection, Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000, covers five volumes of poems and spans two decades. A poetry chapbook, DEADLY POLLEN, is to be published by Word Riot Press in 2003. Stephen is a transtasman poet and writer who lives in Sydney. http:people.smartchat.net.au/~sao/
O Say Can You Hear?
The dripping Gorgon’s head over the sands of Iraq, spittle of snakes flame out
from a thousand gun barrels -
at last! the two worlds unite in the death struggle, the two as one to make a third: fantasy is reality is fantasy.
America has become its own horror cartoon, each thought locked within its renegade cell,
Bugs Bunny holds forth in the senate on the bankrupt dream-stocks buried at Fort Knox.
Donald Duck meantime jerks off in disgust over the American flag - quacks the country’s been bushwacked,
'ain’t worth a hill of beans’
in archaic colloquialisms of a nation near claim jumping the Middle East.
The last capitalist gasp v the last medieval groan; eventually, to make way for the eco-terrorists whose
motto: destroy what you cannot save: will sound the retreat to a history vaporised - a memory erased.
So we come to inherit 'Our Common Loss’.
The Space Shuttle Columbia makes its long wave 'good-bye’
bright finger nails tearing at the sky (like)
'morning Lucifer, that star that beckons all mankind to daily rounds’
scratching down God’s blackboard as seven souls fly away toward the Pleiades.