Forgive me Distant Wars
For bringing Flowers home²
Another Country Burns on TV³
Shall we boast of Empire – where
Time with Ruin sits commissioned?⁴
Our Mighty Government wants to Help
Everyone, even if it must Kill them to do it⁵
Who Manufactures the Bullet? Who Pays the
Taxes? Tell me, is that Blood upon our Hands?⁶
Pour we in our Country’s Purge each drop of us⁷
When they Bomb Other People – We Protest, but
Not Enough – We Oppose them, but Not Enough:
We (Forgive us) live Happily during the War⁸
The sovereign Nation-State has a very Small
Brain with which to think, but tremendously
Powerful Claws to Destroy & Dismember⁹
Politicians Overhead, their Shadows
Wither the Flowers: their Bombs
& Fires Paint our Gardens Red¹⁰
¹ Carolyn Forché, Mourning
² Wisława Szymborska tr. Barańczak & Cavanagh, Under One Small Star
³ Ocean Vuong, Snow Theory
⁴ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Song for the Ragged Schools of London
⁵ Wendell Berry, Window Poems
⁶ Pete Seeger, Last Train to Nuremburg
⁷ William Shakespeare, Macbeth
⁸ Ilya Kaminsky, We Lived Happily During the War
⁹ Lala Har Dayal Mathur
¹⁰ Arthur Rimbaud tr. Paul Schmidt, Partisan Wary Cry