And Now the Weather…
by Michael Blumenthal
Shackelford, Benish, Cantatio, Meyer, Bosselman, Roustum, Bryant, Larsen,
Blecksmith, Nolan, Doursey, and Ashcraft are only the latest of our children
to perish in Iraq, oh lust for domination oh unappeasable oil-hunger oh
hegemony over what we hardly need, and who, now, shall next be added
to our nightly numbers, our moments of silence, our posthumous horrifics
and honorifics, nightly images from the “embedded,” crazed randomness
of death, children my own son’s age holding bazookas, grenades, M-47s,
machine guns of every conceivable sort and disposition, oh random killing
of unfortunates when shallt thou cease? Nolan, Blecksmith, Roustum, Bryant,
what have we done to you? Ridlen and Ashcraft, poor innocent Morrison and
Benish, forgive us our trespasses as we so eagerly punish those who have failed
to trespass against us. Each night the list expands: boom box of death, shrapnel
of unmentionables, tear gas of knock-knock-knocking on hell’s door, oh men in
the White House men of the Senate men and women of the House, what if we
added the names of your children to these illustrious lists? Oh dark night of
the soul, dark night of invading armies, dark night of dismembered corpses, is
it possible we will rest only when Doursey and Ashcraft, Larsen and Blecksmith,
Phipps and Bryant are no longer lonely beneath the rubble, when they, too,
have formed their own nation, and then we go on to domesticate the singing sea.
Copyright © 2008 by Michael Blumenthal.
This poem is part of AND, poems by Michael Blumenthal, to appear with BOA Editions in 2009.