Poem of War

Poem of War


The old rancher of seventy-nine years
said while branding
and nutting young bulls
with the rank odor
of burned hairs and flesh in the air,
the oil slippery red nuts
plopping into a galvanized bucket,
"this smells just like Guadalcanal."


* * *

The theocratic cowboy
forgetting Viet Nam
rides into town on a red horse.
He's praying to himself not God,
though the two are confused
in the heat of vengeance.
The music is the thump of derricks,
the computerized lynch mob
geek dissonance. Clint Eastwood
whispers from an alley, "George, they
were only movies." Shock and Awe.
God is only on God's side.
War prayers swim in their tanks of pus
like poisoned frogs in algae laden ponds.
The red horse he rides
is the horse of blasphemy.
Jesus leads a flower laden donkey
across the Red Sea
in the other directions,
his nose full of the stink
of corpses. Buddha and Mohammed offer
cool water from a palm's shade while
young men die in the rocket's red glare
and in the old men's hard puckered dreams
René Char asked, "Who stands
on the gangplank directing operations,
the captain or the rats?"
Whitman said, "so many young throats
choked on their own blood."
God says nothing.


-- Jim Harrison February 2003

Posted over on Poetes Contre La Guerre