What if war were just a chaotic dress rehearsal in a school play
and torture were long philosophical conversations with idiots,
bullets, tiny bits of lint culled from laughing soldier's uniforms,
fighter jets, kites dropping from the shoulders of the sun,
warships, marshmallows floating in a sea of hot chocolate,
and tanks, funny little cars full of tumbling clowns?
O! If only it were so then all of the world's hideous warmongers might be
paper dolls in rooms full of beautiful children, each with a pair of scissors...
Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. She is the author of four books of poems, The Venus Hottentot, Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, and American Sublime, which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. She is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays, The Black Interior. She has read her work across the U.S. and in Europe, the Caribbean, and South America, and her poetry, short stories, and critical prose have been published in dozens of periodicals and anthologies. She has received many grants and honors, most recently the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954,” and the 2007 Jackson Prize for Poetry, awarded by Poets and Writers. She is a professor at Yale University, and for the academic year 2007-2008 she is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
...when I think of the soldiers packing gear,
Their guns silent, tanks still, standing at the ready,
Eyes moist with liberation and grief, hands wrung their last,
I think of them gleaming, striding away from the savagery,
The dying, the defeated, the triumphant... colorless stench.
When I see them marching out, freed of the difficult sand,
I imagine that black soldiers are most anxious for home,
Calling for the stretch of time to witness their history,
Onlooker to human hope instead of war’s gangling limbs
Stacked like firewood on streets smothered in suffering.
When I think of all of the soldiers coming home
Shipped in those god-awful frowning boxes,
I try to imagine their loved and beautiful faces,
But their smiles float away from who they were.
What a sad and ghastly testament of their use.
Dear Poet,
May your use, your words paint upon this,
Grant us reprieve from an unfavorable history.
Free our hearts and our minds of horrid combat
For war is the chain that has enslaved us all.
“Now he knows what the “n” word means.” She bellowed through discolored teeth, Her vinegar lips pursing upon the dank breath of morning As foul old men slurred about guns and their prideful obligation, “To use `em when times call or when we damn well please!”
“Around here we looks out for our own, if you know what I mean?” Her words slapped against the men’s droll bones; They all got a healthy chuckle from her chattering slabs and Pretended they weren’t scared, tiny, frightened men snorting fear. “They ain’t supposed to come o’ lootin’ when water’s a risin.”
Everywhere the same; old white men selling out for dread, Spitting demise through long and broken teeth, faded of affection Or familiar threads of explanation for tongue-tied unkindness. “Hell! Ya gotta protect yourself. They’s in the wrong neighborhood.” Fusty gangs of bitter men hell-bent on bleeding out the world!
This is the time for hoping, for loving, The time for reaching one another, believing While the water’s drowning all belief! Yes! Now’s the time for considering another Even if all it ever proves is that we’re worth saving!
“We ain’t afraid to shoot em when they comes `round here!” She splattered through her yellowed flapping maw. The foul-smelling men sniggered away another minute; It never occurred to them that the weight of fear and hatred Was sure to sink them when next the waters come o’ lootin’...
Craig Welch takes viewers inside a surreal, meticulously crafted world to meet a mysterious protagonist and his otherworldly visitor.
In this surreal exposition, we meet a man, obsessed with control. His intricate gadgets manipulate yet insulate, as his science dissects and reduces. How exactly are wings attached to the back of angels? In this invented world drained of emotion, where everything goes through the motions, he is brushed by indefinite longings. Whether he can transcend his obsessions and fears is the heart of the matter. A film without words.
