Two. Because Poems Are: (For Fallujah)
- Two. Because Poems Are(For Fallujah)
Because poems are, after all, dialogues between the song of man and the silences of God . ..
– Jorie Graham, American poet
At some point we may be the only ones left. That’s ok with me. We are America.
– George W. Bush, President, United States
Words spool into concertina wire, tiny sparks prick the air, punctuation wounds. Three tiers deep, the wire sleeps, awakens to pursue its hurt. Each day is a membrane, each puncture a hole I pass through. Offer me grief. I know its gravity. I walk to the graves, the names of the dead scribbled into dumb air. There I thread letters into vowels that have no meaning; I scratch at their script. Three times I blow the Shofar. Three times the delicate skin of sound is stretched, and the cry, Allahu Akbar! trembles into ululation, voice within voice, as the layered nameless resurrect into song. O survivor. Your voice is dis-jointed; your tears are music too. I know not what to do; will the sound break? I have emerged from the sea and pulled the trigger. [End Page 100] I want to look. The finger points. No. Don’t show me the bruise; the phosphorescence of bombs robs night of its color. Touch death and sight goes numb. Turn away. Turn.
Sunset. A red that kindles in the body. A lantern beneath water, something swallowed, we are seen through, and there, at molten core, is a word that does not hold. That slips without purchase. That will not grip. Our eyes skip, over, around, through; our hands can do – nothing.
Veronica Golos is the author of A Bell Buried Deep, co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize (Story Line Press), and nominee for a 2004 Pushcart Prize. She was a finalist for the Ann Stanford Prize and for the Tupelo Press Prize. She was a 2003 and 2005 recipient of three-month artist’s residencies at the Wurlitzer Foundation of Taos, New Mexico, and most recently won the Creative Woman Scholarship from A Room of Her Own Foundation. Presently, she is working on a new book of poems, Vocabulary of Silence. She lives in Taos, New Mexico.
Footnotes
Shofar – In Jewish ritual, a ram’s horn blown at Yom Kippur
Allahu Akbar – God is Great, Arabic
Tears are music too – Hecuba, Trojan Women, Euripides, Greek dramatist
I know not what to do; will the sound break – HD, American poet- Fragment Thirty-Six
A red that kindles in the body. Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Iraqi poet [End Page 101]
