THE SOLDIERS WERE THERE...

...tattered rows of drained bone, hanging flesh,
Wounded limbs, lifeless eyes, all staggered with rage.
They lined the granite path that led to his appointed throne,
Not a word was spoken; the hush was violent enough.

He was not prepared to meet such blistering wrath,
The cracked and unsmiling faces, all with such dripping loss.
He was ill equipped and unready for their bony grief,
So he did the only thing he knew, he splintered a dreadful grin,

You’ve done America proud. You’ve served your country with honor.
The road was long, the fight, arduous, but you are home now and
We will honor you for your hard-won accomplishments.
The crow of death no longer waits on thee.

The granite was quite under the push of their bodies,
Their silence floating in the air like an old dog slumped
From the beatings of a gutless master. Warriors,
Whose illustrious hues were bleached from airless days,

Caught him unawares with such gruesome stillness.
As he sat, pondering the moment upon his throne,
Their vacant rumblings cried, Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!
So he did the only thing he knew, he splintered a dreadful grin.

The dead can’t make pretty speeches that echo more lies,
Or write stale accounts of war, or be heroes in a child's life.
They cannot lunge at us with rifles, or clank their bones
In protest against the walls of weapon factories.



© 2008 mrp/tpm

(See the dreadful grin)

Ben Heine - Art

Rolling along "N"...Neo-Resistance - Neural Gourmet - New World Order Reports - News Corpse - Newshoggers - Night Bird's Fountain - No Accuser - No Cure For That - No fish, no nuts - No-More-Ignorance - Not In My Name - Not Much, But All Mine - Not My Tribe - Nothing Aside - Nutopian

TEMPEST

GOP considers delaying convention

Tropical Storm Gustav is forecast to hit U.S. next week as hurricane

Republican officials said yesterday that they are considering delaying the start of the GOP convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul because of Tropical Storm Gustav, which is on track to hit the Gulf Coast, and possibly New Orleans, as a full-force hurricane early next week.

The threat is serious enough that White House officials are also debating whether President Bush should cancel his scheduled convention appearance on Monday, the first day of the convention, according to administration officials and others familiar with the discussion.

For Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Gustav threatens to provide an untimely reminder of Hurricane Katrina. A new major storm along the Gulf Coast would renew memories of one (of many) of the low points of the Bush administration, while pulling public attention away from McCain's formal coronation as the GOP presidential nominee.

(Read the poem)

Devotion in the ever darkening climate. Our
Spirit. This time’s consideration. The will
Of the people. Love. Fairness. Choice. Tyranny.
Failure.
History.
This time’s reflection. History’s christening.
Now. This time. Now. At present,
Before us, in our ready throats, such standing courage.
High in the air and underneath the feet.
Our moment. Our time. Our history. Our
Occasion.
And the stroke of the clock and the quickening sea
And the pace and the face of our pale and dark occurrence
And the call of our mother’s and father’s
Mislaid chance.

Our backs must hold this up, haul it onward and set
This day on course. This time. This
Moment. Child. Renewal. Birth. Joy
Swimming near the frame.
Hope of victory. Grasp the radiance
In our hands; the clear glow of expectation.
Ready now, like a vast breath in our storm.

© 2008 mrp/tpm

Rolling along "M"...Maggie's Madness - Main and Central - March 19 Iraq War Blogswarm - Martha, Martha.... - Mccs1977 - MeInAction - Mock, Paper, Scissors - Mockingbird's Medley - Morpheus Revolutions - My Past, My Present and My Future - My Saturday Evening Post

SHRIEK

When the bodies need counting
Fall upon your knees, lift your eyes
Beyond the stars, the universe,
and plunge your fingernails into your sides
and howl! Howl above the red sidewalk!
Then stand up and shriek at every loveless thing.

© 2008 mrp/tpm

Watch Shriek - a poetryman video

Rolling along "K"...
Karmalised
Katrinacrat Blog
King of Zembla
Kommandos Project

AVOIDABLE

We are all walking these streets
Under our own abysmal verdict.
Frequently we hear that we’re faced
by avoidable contamination. We’ve heard it before,
that we must breed our skin apart from those others
until our masks are solid and chaste,
irremovable, useless. Force the skin’s hue down,
imprison our colors on the nomadic streets.

We need be single-minded to form our face
into the perfect color of a perverted truth;
this evolution is ugliest now,
storming its infection across the world.

We’re walking the streets, the roads,
the twisting spheres bending away; humanity
begging we refuse this council, this deception. One
stride on this earth, one long, delightful use of man;
animal, dying now, ready to live. Our fuel’s the blood
Under our skin, our reckless mind, the contagion.

Understand this; our progression has long commenced.
We cannot forgo its breathing revolution.
We cannot, from its rise, ourselves remove.
O! It will thrash our sticks and stones,
and turn its heaven away from our brutality,
away from our bigotry, our war, our contempt of evolution,
until we dissolve our masks and flee our unbending dreams!

O we need make our pulse in the unknown.
We are the pollen that dropped from the same flower,
eyeless and frightened.
Our worthless dread,
motionless souls,
splintered hearts,
cagey minds,
thrashed hopes,
derelict empathy,
throttled voices,
parading our death
over scorched noises.

Maybe we’re not walking the streets and roads...
maybe we’re being carried by the wind?

© 2008 mrp/tpm

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Jade Gate
Jakester Express
Jesus Was Not a Republican
Jonestown - Joshing Politics
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June Revolution
Just Ain't Right

BLACK OAK TREE

An Ode to Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones


(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

Democratic U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress and a strong critic of the Iraq war, died Wednesday after a brain hemorrhage. (More...)

Stephanie was a “…fearless friend and unyielding advocate…” Barack Obama.

They gazed in awe at the black oak tree
standing tall above their many ashen faces.

She smiled upon them with lustrous teeth;
a majestic peace formed of its own will.

In the day she offered them her shade,
in the evenings,
the soothing light of her moon.

The warm curve of her skin embraced them,
spoke with them,
arcing her limbs in benevolent dance.

When the people would fix their eyes upon her
she kindly offered mother, sister, friend
and her grace touched them, as it does now,
in their search for an equally dazzling poem…

© 2008 mrp/tpm

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SADDLEBACK

McCain's Embrace of Judeo-Christian Values
(H/T to Crooks & Liars)

On a frozen winter evening at a Town Hall meeting in a school in the Manchester, N.H., suburbs, John McCain expressed surprise and irritation with an intelligence report downplaying the threat of Iran’s nuclear program.

At the end of a long list of reasons to be suspicious of the Iranians, McCain declared: “And they sure don’t share our Judeo-Christian values.”

It seemed at the time to be an odd thing to say about a Muslim country. After all, even if there were no nuclear program, no oil, and no rabble-rousing president, Iran still wouldn’t have Judeo-Christian values. And it’s troubling to wonder if that alone would be a reason for suspicion.

~And to make matters worse, the cat is out of the bag on the nature of John McCain and Rick Warren’s true relationship. They have just announced that they've been working on a film together for the past two and a half years.

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

Rick "Saddleback" Warren calls it, "A grand epic of even grander proportions than the "Left Behind" series or even grander than my church, which is pretty friggin’ big!”

John “Cone of Silence” McCain says, “It is by far the greatest accomplishment of my life, except of course when I was water-boarded and sleep deprived as a prisoner of war in Vietnam."

From the Academy Award-non-winning duo of John McCain and Rick Warren comes an epic American political tale, Saddleback Mountain, based on the presidential forum hosted by Pulitzer Prize-non-winning huckster Rick "Saddleback" Warren and adapted for the screen by the celebrity turned presidential candidate Pulitzer Prize-non-winning senator from Arizona, John "Cone of Silence" McCain.

Set against the sweeping and monstrous rotunda of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, the film tells the story of two men – a Senator and a televangelist – who meet in the summer of 2008 for a national presidential forum, and unexpectedly forge a lifelong connection, one whose complications, joys, lies, and tragedies provide a testament to the endurance and power of love and the love of power between two men trying to rise up to the highest seat known to man and lead America (and the world) down to its knees or up to its salvation, whichever comes first.

(In theatres on Christmas Day, 2008.)

Rolling along "H"...Hail DubyUS! - Happening Here: - Hardboiled Dreams Healing Iraq - Helen Wheels - Just Ain't Right - Here Still Running - Hill's Country - House of the Rising Sons

AMANDA

Amanda,
I thought your loss was horrendous,
As an eye glimpsing war through a prism,
A safe distance, detached and far away.

Where I stood, the bombs seemed like deaf children
Franticly signing with their noiseless hands
Upon the streets of an obscure, idle freedom,
Where I tried desperately to speak to you,
Fumblingly reaching out like a blind man
Fending off a swarm of callous wasp.

Amanda,
You wouldn’t hear me, you couldn’t see me,
But I was there, screaming for you to live,
My tongue was as thick
As the pavement I stood on,
And my feet, as heavy.

My frantic cries were an unspoken plea
To the men with their hands on the lever,
To the heartless, the sightless warrior,
The squatting powers and bending earth,
To an unleashed evil where noise breathes
Like the cold-blooded machinery of ruin.

© 2008 mrp/tpm


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KAKASHI (scarecrow)

What have you done to this time of ours?
What mix of stinking wretchedness have you left us?
What in the bedraggled bottom of hell were you thinking?

You, with your godforsaken pride and lifeless eyes
With soiled thoughts planted like a rock garden,
The weight of the next idea holding down the last.
You don't understand your deplorable sins upon humanity,
You with your excuses pinned under stones of hatred.
Goddamn you. It is too late for your trite regrets,
Our hopes scrape the granite of immovable statues
Like moments in a famished dream of peace without end.

We call to thee to look back at your wanton wreckage,
To acknowledge this; our complicit suffering,
To grieve with us, our countries bereavement.
The martyrs of your making are built with straw,
Like the unholy kakashi, arms spread like Jesus,
Prepared for nothing but a murder of crow.

Death is the bitter fowl scraping at your sockets,
The harbinger tearing through your thankless nights
Like deadly shrapnel scurrying across your lawn
To mow you down. What should we do with such a gift?
The heroes tombs are all prepared, waiting for them to fall
And you sit there with a smugness reserved for kings,
Kings, whose empire’s have come and gone, who ride
Defiantly upon a beast carved from the same stone.


© 2008 mrp/tpm

Watch the Movie - Kakashi


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Faith in Honest Doubt - Faithfully Liberal - Follow Me Here... - Forever Under Construction - Forms Most Beautiful - Fran I Am - Freeway Blogger - Freida Bee - From the Left - furry friends

AMIRA'S SUMMER BOUGH

On her bruised knees she leans down
near the dying grass, eager to heed the
joyous tears of heavens influence;
dew drops, tiny wishes to cleanse the stained meadow
and blanket all the dead eyes of summer’s prey
(hope sunk by the shadow of heavy tanks).

Dear Amira dreamed of more than war,
more than terror, death and torture,
dreamed of laughter and friends, the tender
touch of her mother’s bosom to her cheek
as she cuddled near in shriveled nightfall
(love blunted by the rasp of bombs).

Anxious, she bends forward with promise in
the gentle curve of her spine. She’s desperate
to feel the coolness against her cheeks,
(no light could hold the perilous bough)
those nights when her mother fiercely hugged her
as unbearable noises began painting the meadow.

© 2008 mrp/tpm

Occupation Orphaned Millions


Rolling along "E"...
Ebullient Skepticism - Enigma4ever - Evil Bobby

REST IN PEACE... MAHMOUD DARWISH

A Lover From Palestine
by Mahmoud Darwish

Her eyes are Palestinian
Her name is Palestinian
Her dress and sorrow Palestinian
Her kerchief, her feet and body Palestinian
Her words and silence Palestinian
Her voice Palestinian
Her birth and her death Palestinian

~~~

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has died after surgery at the age of 67, hospital and Palestinian officials say.

He suffered complications after undergoing open-heart surgery in Houston, Texas, said a spokesman for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Mr Darwish was the most recognised Palestinian poet in the world, using his words to try to draw attention to the Palestinian cause.

He also delivered harsh criticism of the infighting by Palestinian factions. (Full Story...)

~~~

I am from There
by Mahmoud Darwish

I come from there and remember,
I was born like everyone is borne, I have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the godsent food of birds and olive tree beyond the ken of time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there. I return the sky to its mother when for its mother the
sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home

~~~

Mahmoud Darwish is considered to be the most important contemporary Arab poet working today. He was born in 1942 in the village of Barweh in the Galilee, which was razed to the ground by the Israelis in 1948. As a result of his political activism he faced house arrest and imprisonment.

Darwish was the editor of Ittihad Newspaper before leaving in 1971 to study for a year in the USSR. Then he went to Egypt where he worked in Cairo for Al-Ahram Newspaper and in Beirut, Lebanon as an editor of the Journal “Palestinian Issues”. He was also the director of the Palestinian Research Center.

Darwish was a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO and lived in exile between Beirut and Paris until his return in 1996 to Palestine. His poems are known throughout the Arab world, and several of them have been put to music. His poetry has gained great sophistication over the years, and has enjoyed international fame for a long time. He has published around 30 poetry and prose collections, which have been translated into 35 languages. He is the editor in chief and founder of the prestigious literary review Al Karmel, which has resumed publication in January 1997 out of the Sakakini Centre offices. He published in 1998 the poetry collection: Sareer el Ghariba (Bed of the Stranger), his first collection of love poems.

In 2000 he published Jidariyya (Mural) a book consisting of one poem about his near death experience in 1997. He published his book of poetry "Stage of Siege" in 2002.

In 1997 a documentary was produced about him by French TV directed by noted French-Israeli director Simone Bitton. He is a commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Mahmound Darwish is an honorary member of the Sakakini Centre.

~~~

Without exile, who am I?
by Mahmoud Darwish

Stranger on the bank, like the river . . . tied up to your
name by water. Nothing will bring me back from my free
distance to my palm tree: not peace, nor war. Nothing
will inscribe me in the Book of Testaments. Nothing,
nothing glints off the shore of ebb and flow, between
the Tigris and the Nile. Nothing
gets me off the chariots of Pharaoh. Nothing
carries me for a while, or makes me carry an idea: not
promises, nor nostalgia. What am I to do, then? What
am I to do without exile, without a long night
staring at the water?
Tied up
to your name
by water . . .
Nothing takes me away from the butterfly of my dreams
back into my present: not earth, nor fire. What
am I to do, then, without the roses of Samarkand? What
am I to do in a square that burnishes the chanters with
moon-shaped stones? Lighter we both have
become, like our homes in the distant winds. We have
both become friends with the clouds'
strange creatures; outside the reach of the gravity
of the Land of Identity. What are we to do, then . . . What
are we to do without exile, without a long night
staring at the water?
Tied up
to your name
by water . . .
Nothing's left of me except for you; nothing's left of you
except for me -- a stranger caressing his lover's thigh: O
my stranger! What are we to do with what's left for us
of the stillness, of the siesta that separates legend from legend?
Nothing will carry us: not the road, nor home.
Was this road the same from the start,
or did our dreams find a mare among the horses
of the Mongols on the hill, and trade us off?
And what are we to do, then?
What
are we to do
without
exile?



Rolling along "C"...
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