Another year of great poetry in the 2008 Porter Gulch Review, published by David Sullivan and company at Cabrillo College in Aptos California. You can view the entire edition on-line at: http://www.cabrillo.edu/publications/portergulch/PGR%202008%20reviews%20critiques%20final.pdf
Three of my poems appear this year: Kamikaze Diaries on page 98; The Gulf on page 102; and, American Jihad on page 105. All three poems address the vagaries of war, misplaced passion, and human longing. I've included them below, too, for easy reading:
Kamikaze Diaries
Reflections of Japanese pilots on suicide missions in World War II
---by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
Some wrote poetry, the only way to approach such feeling.
Knowing the moment of one’s death, its purpose
however terrible, brings a lucidity few know.
Most were students, familiar with Western literature.
One carried Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death,
along with the Bible on his final mission. Passion
is an unlocked gun-room—a life a bullet,
resting in its box, aimless, waiting.
The Gulf
On a cruise ship in the Caribbean
sailing from Miami towards Jamaica,
I watch news of the war in a bar.
It is a long way from my small town America
as I traverse the edge of a vast Atlantic
touching Middle Eastern shores while
teasing this Gulf of Mexico, heat-lightening
in the air, electric, mysterious.
Here, the threat of hurricanes is growing,
stirring from the sea as giant men turning
in their steaming tubs, waves spilling over
shore in that violent way that holds no malice.
It is only the way of things disturbed, vented,
released. Even the smallest shrug
of a country, of a planet’s weather,
brings an unexpected new age
to the plasma screens of a shrinking
middle class—shrinking polar ice,
shrinking shores, our shrinking
moral fiber, our bereft will.
It may be that storm will come,
that the innumerable small ways
one abandons a first love—
such petty betrayals—
will leave us ever after
looking backwards
at the time that now is,
when this ravaged garden globe
awaited simple tending.
It may be a storm of wind and heat,
of ice and flood—or our own Armageddon,
a storm of giant men with tiny hearts
pummeling the earth with their fists,
mumbling the dull dark of war.
A storm to break the levees
of our modest privilege, flooding
the front-yards of America—
leaving us in the superdomes
of our broken faith, without light,
without one excuse.
The following poem, American Jihad, deserves a short preface, which I gave at the poetry reading for the 2008 Porter Gulch Review release:
"I wrote the poem American Jihad not out of disrespect for this country I
love so much, but because I love the world more. This planet has seen so
many empires come and go, always claiming the moral right to dominate,
always blind in this regard. I was raised to believe that America was
different, that everything we did in the world was based on not only our
best interest as a country, but in doing the right thing towards others.
Rebuilding Germany and Japan after World War II so that they could re-enter
the world stage as partners rather than enemies. But I've become
painfully aware that our country far too often acts just like any other
empire: selfishly and destructively. For me, to be an American today carries
such conflicted feelings of pride, shame, and a desire to wake us up to the
fact that we risk becoming what we fight against; in essence, we have become
our own American Jihad.
The voice in the poem is meant to be at once proud, rageful, ironic,
conflicted...really an amalgam of many voices from the baby boomer
generation I am a part of. The offensive language at the end of the poem is
meant to be offensive, because it is the only language I know of capable of
conveying the depth of blind anger inherent in our stance towards those we
fight and fear as a country. I wrote it in a prose poem format, because the
square frame of the poem helps contain the many conflicted feelings within
the rant."
American Jihad
I love this country, the wide span of it, the airport planes lined up like expectant brides waiting to fly, to go get it all, the wheat fields, the growing urban suburban sprawls, the melting pot melting, melting, the vast steam of it, the churning stir of it. I love this American arrogance that, yes, you and me baby, yes Mr. White Man like me, the Korean refugee, the black bro in the ghetto, the Latin in the barrio, Bill Gates, Rush and his redneck mates, the politicos waving like pampas grass in wind, that we’re all gonna get it all—that somehow our shrinking churches, our bulging credit, every new war, every scandal, every pork-barreled waste, is just another bump in the fast road to this American Dream. That despite the signs of the times, fuck it, it doesn’t matter—I saw that doe-eyed hippie girl stick that flower in the soldier’s rifle too, and yea there was Kent State and Vietnam, and yea we said we’d never go there again, and yea here we are again sniffing oil like a crackhead in the Middle East, the poppy fields of the Taliban funding guns and heroin for whatever diddly squat dictator lets us intravenously mainline our growing habit—shit, I’m proud anyway, there’s still room from sea to shining sea for every goddamn one of us. Ain’t no way this empire’s gonna fall. Fuck Rome, fuck Alexander and Napoleon, fuck the Aztec, the Incas, the Maya, the Chinese emperors, fuck the British empire, no matter what we do, no matter how we do it, no matter where we go, this world’s gonna love us, this world’s gonna become us, this ride, baby, is gonna goddamn last forever.
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