Pain trains an undisciplined mind.
I will end yours if you end mine.
Little feet, little feet are playing
Hopscotch among the landmines.
Hope has worked miracles before.
If yours didn't, how can mine?
I could have learned to welcome night,
If only you had been mine.
How dare you put words in God's mouth,
Shail? Why not. He put ashes in mine.
Here we are
in our doughboys and camos, our doughty frocks
with drips of bitter on the sleeve, our passions revving
their pulp to pittance at a gas station
in the city that never peeps —
OUR PATRON OF FALLING SHORT,
WHO BECAME A PRAYER
When History turns soldiers into battles, you turn them into grass.
Bashō, Sweet, is it honorable? But for these men who died with grunts
and clangs in their ears, for their horses with snapped legs, I haven’ t got
the art to make them into anything. I fold the grass in the shape
of a man, very literal, very primitive and leave it on
the field and say, “Forgive me valorous men for my ineptitude.”
Just then, the little man falls down in the wind and — huh! — there is art.
Many believe in the stars.
Take Quinamid
The son of a Dardanian astrologer
Who disregarded what his father said
And came to Troy in a taxi.
Gone.
Odysseus to Greece:
II. iv
I am writing this poem
about the 1965 massacre
of Indonesians by Indonesians
which in an article ten years later
I could not publish
except in Nottingham England with
a friend Malcolm Caldwell who has since
himself been murdered
no one will say by whom but I will guess
The Israeli Navy,
sailing to the end of the world,
stocked with grain
and books black with God’ s verse,
turned back,
rather than sail on the Sabbath.
Six days, was the consensus,
was enough for anyone.
I
By nature Indians are very lazy and sworn enemies of work.
They prefer to suffer hunger than to fatigue themselves
with agriculture. Therefore, they must be forced to do this by their
superiors. With six industrious Europeans one can do more
in one day than fifty Indians
— Joseph Och, Missionary in Sonora: Travel Reports
of Joseph Och, S. J., 1755-1767
