Mourning in America, September 2011

In vast stretches

of the nation's heart
               --desert--
    no poetry
                metaphor
                                song
                           or
                                     sacrament.
Water, sky, earth and wind
are commodities now.
Bottle, sell, buy, cut, exploit.

For all the houses of worship,

                holiness goes homeless.
Who rises to face the dawn?
Who pulls off the freeway to
                bid the sun adieu?
Who daily dips hands in water...
                weeps
                      at wonders?

Children

                are weaned quickly
from the language of the leaves,
their eyes turned to tiny screens
              of screaming electrons.
      The true songs
                swirling so near
are lost to their hearing.

 The loudest preachers

                leech
blood and money
                from the frightened.
God and our ancestors are
the ultimate commodities,
used when
                advantageous,
invoked
but not summoned
                for fear of
what their eyes will speak.

In truth,

God has left us to our own devices,
knowing
devices
bring no virtue...
                only  widen the divides               
even as they offer the illusion
of communion.

The industrial dragon's hunger

                can never be satisfied.
It eats its way
                toward famine
and then,
      only then,
                perhaps...

My silver husky, Sofie, knows the songs.

She heard them in her mother's womb,
          handed down by the old dog spirits
                who learned them
                                from wolves, fires,
                                       tall trees,
                thawing meadows
                         and men still as ice.                              
She sings, rumbles, warbles, wails and whispers
                the shamans' secret tongue.

I will rise with her to face the dawn
                and take my mantra from the morning wind.
I will lay with her under the jacaranda
                and howl
                     at the setting sun,
hoping
    that when the new moon rises
                                Americans
                                                will also
                                     rise anew.

 C2011 Bob Kamm

No Justice Here

A  slug of metal

      blew open the skull

of Osama bin Laden

just above an eye

                                that

                 for all its lofty visions

and the height of the man

                could not see it coming.

His life ended too fast.

Justice has been served

                but Justice can’t be

                                done.

He knew no agony

                to approach

                    the suffering

of our brothers and sisters

                mothers and fathers

whose eyes did see an “it” coming

--a tower of glass,

a concrete pentagon

a grassy field

    where lovers might have walked;

and the “it” of all their relatives

                all their countrymen and women

who over and over

have imagined those last seconds of their lives,

                wept

                raged

                torn at the air

                punched at walls

and found themselves

                imprisoned by visions

    of melted metal,

blood-dyed dust,

                shards of talismans,

     spears of bone.

How can justice be done

for such a sundering of souls?

The blind lady has lost her scales

                and gone begging in the streets.

The gut yearns for

                what it cannot have.

No death could be sufficiently

                appalling

no solitary confinement

                even in the darkest dungeon sufficiently

                excruciating,

no revenge sweet enough

to wash out the bitter spit

                he left in our mouths.

So let’s not talk of justice done.

Let’s say simply,

“He’s dead…

one less psychopathic killer

                on an earth

that still has plenty left to

                lift the bloody mantle

                                as if it were a sacred shroud.

C 2011 Bob Kamm