Social commentaries

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her fingers' touch
And from her fingers ate its bit.

Did she in touching that lone wing
Recall the years before her mind
Became a bitter, an abstract thing,
Her thought some popular enmity:
Blind and leader of the blind
Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’ s dead and gone,
It’ s with O’ Leary in the grave.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I can no longer blush. Half-face towards the starchy scape.
Birds limn the spindle trees, their Listerine-hued eyes dart
as they trill mechanical dirges tabulating not again, not
again / I can no longer blush. The flat arctic sky
boundlessly jogs to another hemisphere / She grows!
Or her pectoral grows or all her pectorals grow / A drop of body
oil the size of a water balloon splooshes down on a man as a graceless
anointing, atomizing into tears / How delicate the sounds are from

Overheard in the heat, the air, the fruit fly’ s drone
of the perfect helix, overheard in science’ s repartee

of right and wrong, in the gossip of perfumed women
basking in London’ s charmless sun,

Overheard in the gasps of penny sideshows, the formulas
of doctors summing up freaks in taxidermic clinics,

Overheard in the echo of cubic hallways,
in the speculum’ s wand first tested on the slave woman,

Overheard in history’ s senile tympanum

was a Song.

REVERSALS

There are graves under the houses and houses
under the graves and linking the three

a broad stone staircase where the dead
go up and the living go down. They pass one another

wordlessly which might mean they don’ t know, or else
they’ re pretending not to know. You can smell

the orange grove on the hill; you can hear
children bowling barrel hoops down the street.

Two women gossip as they fill their jug at the spring.
Their secrets cloud the water.

Staring up into the tank's belly lit
by a bare bulb hanging down off
the exhaust, a mechanic's hands are up
inside the dark metallic innards doing something
that looks personal, private. This tank is nothing
like the ones the Americans deploy.
Those have uranium piercing shells that could melt
right through this tank's armor and set off
the ammo box: nothing can withstand the American tanks.

But where, oh where is the holy idiot,
truth teller and soothsayer, familiar

of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer
whose garble and babble fill rich and poor,

homeless and housed, with awe and fear?
Is he hiding in the pit of the walkie-talkie,

its grid of holes insatiably hungry,
almost like a baby, sucking in the police sergeant's

quiet voice as he calls in reinforcements?
Oh holy idiot, is that you sniffing the wind

for the warm turd smell on the mounted policemen
backing their horses' quivering, skittish

What came wafting
down the ditch
by the marsh grass waving
opened a hole
in the day through which,

like a puff of breath,
a ghost fountained up
rising in soft slo-mo,
lost, desolate, no place
left to go.

Dear bloody
Beirut and its internet cafes
were still smoking
from last night's
"little bombing."