Sestina For Thoreau

SESTINA FOR THOREAU

Choose words carefully it's time for laments.
Wink continuously, don't see or hear.
Pull the new cap tightly against the wind.
Listen to free speech whistling through corners.
And at the edges of leaves and fields, wait.
Don't believe the world is safe or good-willed.

Citing his pig-headed resolve, good-willed,
the president of the free world laments
war and seeks it. He, unable to wait
for its declaration, smirks and does hear
no man. Pipers careen around corners
swept by linguistic debris and the wind.

In opposition, millions choose the wind,
walk the street bearing signs, crying, good-willed.
Knees against concrete they pray on corners
The un-elected president laments,
finds no reason to listen or to hear,
decides, re-decides new motives can't wait.

He sends troops, more troops, and weapons to wait.
Huge, nuclearized, aimed into the wind,
blissfully metal, unable to hear,
while leaflets announcing noble, good-willed
intentions flutter with dooming laments
for those to die on targeted corners.

Those on the lamentable, doomed corners
are instructed to rejoice as they wait.
The free world's president hears their laments
crying for life as if they were mere wind
in willows, willing to comply, good-willed,
eager to die for American greed. Hear,

hear, O president, Iraq begs to hear
genocide justified on the corners
of the free world, murder done in good-willed
remote, removed, sanitized halls where wait
awful dooms of heartless, profit swept wind
over the corporate landscape that laments

our market share, our imperial wait
grown thin, the implacable need of wind,
of power, for the hypocrite's laments.

O he laments and laments and laments
promises, promises, wild in the wind
his righteous blood is up, war cannot wait.



Jan Haag