{"article":{"id":31021,"heading":"Symbology minus one","author":"Gregory Sotir","created":"2003-02-23 15:24:45","modified":"2003-03-12 07:25:19","last_modified":"Wed, 12 Mar 2003 14:25:19","article":"

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

<\/p>\n","contact":"","link":"http:\/\/www.poetsagainstthewar.org\/","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/plain","summary":"An antiwar poem","numcomment":1,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/","filesize":null,"article_url":"\/news\/2003\/02\/31021.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[{"id":35007,"heading":"It's crap","article":"It's crap, George. you're not a poet.\r\nRead my poem "Waking Early Sunday Morning".","author":"Robert Lowell","parent_id":31021,"mime_type":"text\/plain","created":"2003-03-12 07:25:22","modified":"2003-03-12 07:25:22","fileurl":""}]}