An antiwar poem
Symbology minus one
Do poems wait to be written?
May they never be written, never read?
Paper sheets,
thick and rich like the top-of-the-cream
in bottles I can imagine,
drift down through the smoky air
in a room with reverberating rebar
and condemned concrete.
Thoughts that once filled this air
now sprawl
limp and unmoving.
Dreams of last night
that have no more doors.
Unfinished ice water slowly regains
ambience on the floor
as the unfilled paper floats down
to sop it up like so much gauze.
Will there ever be enough gauze to fill wounds
ever enough poets screaming and chanting their verse
ever enough time to escape the decimations of the past.
Metal flying through the sky is unusual.
Civilian deaths are not.
But they are connected.
As one strand of blue
lays next to threads of white
lays next to threads of red.
Crop circles are forming spontaneously.
The SUV is proclaimed more valuable than human life.
The atom bomb is declared a weapon of choice
and torture is finally enshrined in legal prevarications.
Stranger things have happened.
What is made by people
comes back to people,
like metal flying through the air,
like paper floating up and then drifting down
like poems never written,
stopped and strangled,
disappearing in the bitter smoke.
G. Sotir 2003
Original: Symbology minus one