To the Forty-Third President of the United States of America

To the Forty-third President
of the United States of America

Mr. President, our history speaks
to us, the history of Chile and
China, El Salvador and Nicaragua,
Somalia, Puerto Rico— today, our
solemn duty is to defy your willful
aggression, to parse provocative words
and habits, your heroic battle to
distract us. Perhaps you think God
will protect us from the religious
zealots who sanctify your rule, from
your opportunism and the race renewal,
the investiture you have assumed because,
as always, it is not yours. Let me ask
an obvious question.

If we are to establish peace
and security for our nation,
must we not do everything in our
power to end the beginnings of war,
must we not allow our imaginations
to craft a lasting peace?
Are not the children you would
choose to incinerate our own?
We try on masks to trick our isolated,
frightened selves, to propagate our
sacred uncertainties among the children
of this blue planet, a world we create
and ruin every day.

Mr. President,
where do we walk, where may we sit down,
where can we work or rest, weep or pray,
what field does a man sunder and seed
in a country living only in memory,
dying every day at the hands of those
who profess to love her most?
They say God loves America,
and that this
“old bitch gone in the teeth”
is heaven on earth;
in preemptive violence, in obstinacy,
in entitlements for the rich,
this murdered land, this, the people's
earth, is our reward for being right
no matter how wrong we are.

What “urge and rage”
thrives in the American heart,
that so many cheer
this obsessive, unilateral madness?

Even through precise layers of glass,
the TV peddling a thrilling efficiency,
we cannot see them, the ghosts that
inhabit our malnourished statistics,
inhospitable closets, cold kitchens
where we eat meat and raise goblets
of wine to celebrate our belief that
they are not like us. I want to spend
more time with my daughter,
my five-year-old, I want to see her,
to know she is alive. It is her
“evening of the morning,”
she is just fine, though she implores
me to tell her the
“acommitation of naked truth.”

I imagine Iraqis, weakened by sanctions,
spending time with their children.
What do they play together,
what makes them laugh,
what crude medicine do parents spoon
down fevered throats, when they too
are roused from nightmares of fragile
necklaces of bone, slung around the
necks of American fighters whose hearts
we camouflage? Who will witness the small
charred bodies floating in the Tigris,
children writhing in pain,
in smoking rubble,
in the ruins of Bab al-Wastani
or the Mirjan Mosque,
severed limbs and glazed eyes
that last night followed their
favorite story by candlelight?

Mr. President,
what does it mean when you say
Saddam Hussein, Butcher of Baghdad,
official liar, terrorizes himself?
If he brings terror upon himself,
will our dark angels exterminate him
or his already wounded people;
and would you answer Mr. Korb:
What if Kuwait grew carrots,
what if Iraq's main exports were
chick peas and cotton shawls
destined for American women
longing for the exotic?

To be honest, I have forgotten from
what we must abstain, yet we know how
to prevent conception. “C'est la vie,”
you say, saddled up, ready to ride with
your posse across oil fields just like
those in Texas. It appears the one thing
we cherish more than petroleum
or our children is the greased machinery
of destruction.

*

Notes

1. “old bitch gone in the teeth”:
Ezra Pound, from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

2. “urge and rage”: Anne Frank, from
The Diary of a Young Girl (1947; tr. 1952),
entry for 3 May 1944

3. “evening of the morning”:
Kyra Gray O'Daly

4. “acommitation of naked truth”:
Kyra Gray O'Daly

5. Bab al-Wastani: the last remaining
of the renowned gates of Baghdad

6. Mirjan Mosque: ancient mosque,
completed in 1358

7. “If Kuwait grew carrots we wouldn't
give a damn.” Lawrence Korb, former U.S.
assistant secretary of defense, on the
motives for “Operation Desert Storm”

8. “The war on terror involves Saddam
Hussein because of the nature of Saddam
Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein,
and his willingness to terrorize himself.”
George W. Bush

9. “C'est la vie” : “Either they are
with us or not. Either one is fine.
C'est la vie.” An aide to George W. Bush,
quoting him

10. “I know some in Europe see me as a
Texas cowboy with six-shooters at my side.
But the truth is I prefer to ride with a
posse.” One senior Bush aide, recalling
President Bush's comment to Czech President
Vaclav Havel in Prague (Fall 2002)

-- William O'Daly

Posted over on Poets Against the War