Gulf War II

January afternoon/Gulf War I

The saccharine sweetness
of a pink sky
at 4 pm on that day
turned me from my sidewalk
to retch in the hedge.

It was a candy, perhaps of cotton,
that had seemed so sweet,
so gentle. We´d known
only the fair, the clown,
not that it was a
prelude, an
early shade of red
sweet as a drop of
blood
licked from a hangnail,
an
addiction.

And the calm around filling my ears with
burning sticks,
the roaring calm
flaming in my ears, the
flames of us,
the flames and the screams of
all of us,
slowly, quietly, surely,
burning down our backs like the
lit fuse of a
codependent firecracker,
sizzling in our need, and
spineless in our desire,
to destroy each other,





Gulf War II

this same calm will be the song,
the moment of the undoing of it all,
when the Mother of a
True Victory
(a victory of creased kneebacks and unstopped ears
a triumph of learned ashes and burlap)
when that Mother, with Her holy tongue
will lick the white tombstones
just to soften what´s been turned to bone
just to get us all singing again.
Then, She´ll find the sidewalk crack and
step upon it, that Her
back might be broken and the
song released from our spines, that
the earth might shake and the rocks split, the
tomb break open and
the bodies of many people who
thought they were holy might go into the
city they thought was holy and
make it finally so, singing:

Deep the pull of it
Low the breath to it
Dark the start of it, always.
It is the hammering of words
to ring clean in the language of the heart.
What else is song

and how else,
America,
would you rather speak?


Joseph Byrd

Posted over on The Pedestal Magazine