a second poem for the 'mythical little guy'

Some Further Words
by Wendell Berry

Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man. I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose
is a language that can repay just thanks
and honor for those gifts, a tongue
set free from fashionable lies.

Neither this world nor any of its places
is an "environment." And a house
for sale is not a "home." Economics
is not "science," nor "information" knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool
in a public office is not a "leader."
A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost
of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,
returns in the night to say again:
"Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore."

The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this "progress."
So is the cowardice that calls it "inevitable."

I think the issues of "identity" mostly
are poppycock. We are what we have done,
which includes our promises, includes
our hopes, but promises first. I know
a "fetus" is a human child.
I loved my children from the time
they were conceived, having loved
their mother, who loved them
from the time they were conceived
and before. Who are we to say
the world did not begin in love?

I would like to die in love as I was born,
and as myself of life impoverished go
into the love all flesh begins
and ends in. I don't like machines,
which are neither mortal nor immortal,
though I am constrained to use them.
(Thus the age perfects its clench.)
Some day they will be gone, and that
will be a glad and a holy day.
I mean the dire machines that run
by burning the world's body and
its breath. When I see an airplane
fuming through the once-pure sky
or a vehicle of the outer space
with its little inner space
imitating a star at night, I say,
"Get out of there!" as I would speak
to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.
When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!" I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.
The body's life is its own, untouched
by the little clockwork of explanation.
I approve of death, when it comes in time
to the old. I don't want to live
on mortal terms forever, or survive
an hour as a cooling stew of pieces
of other people. I don't believe that life
or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire
the household of the human soul,
and all the creatures are burning within it.

"Intellectual property" names
the deed by which the mind is bought
and sold, the world enslaved. We
who do not own ourselves, being free,
own by theft what belongs to God,
to the living world, and equally
to us all. Or how can we own a part
of what we only can possess
entirely? Life is a gift we have
only by giving it back again.
Let us agree: "the laborer is worthy
of his hire," but he cannot own what he knows,
which must be freely told, or labor
dies with the laborer. The farmer
is worthy of the harvest made
in time, but he must leave the light
by which he planted, grew, and reaped,
the seed immortal in mortality,
freely to the time to come. The land
too he keeps by giving it up,
as the thinker receives and gives a thought,
as the singer sings in the common air.

I don't believe that "scientific genius"
in its naive assertions of power
is equal either to nature or
to human culture. Its thoughtless invasions
of the nuclei of atoms and cells
and this world's every habitation
have not brought us to the light
but sent us wandering farther through
the dark. Nor do I believe
"artistic genius" is the possession
of any artist. No one has made
the art by which one makes the works
of art. Each one who speaks speaks
as a convocation. We live as councils
of ghosts. It is not "human genius"
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world,
from the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead--
an intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but --
to those who have it more dear than life.

And just as tenderly to be known
are the affections that make a woman and a man
their household and their homeland one.
These too, though known, cannot be told
to those who do not know them, and fewer
of us learn them, year by year.
These affections are leaving the world
like the colors of extinct birds,
like the songs of a dead language.

Think of the genius of the animals,
every one truly what it is:
gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made
of light and luminous within itself.
They know (better than we do) how
to live in the places where they live.
And so I would like to be a true
human being, dear reader-a choice
not altogether possible now.
But this is what I'm for, the side
I'm on. And this is what you should
expect of me, as I expect it of
myself, though for realization we
may wait a thousand or a million years.

May-August, 2001
Berry, Wendell. "Some Further Words." American Poetry Review May/Jun 2002

a poem for the mythical little guy

To the United States Senate

(partial poem, I'll spare you, from Vachel Lindsay, 1911)

Be warned, O wanton ones, ...[ ]
Black wrath awaits. You all shall eat the dust.
You dare not say: "To-morrow will bring peace;
Let us make merry, and go forth in lust."

What will you trading frogs do on a day
When Armageddon thunders thro' the land;
When each sad patriot rises, mad with shame,
His ballot or his musket in his hand?

In the distracted states from which you came
The day is big with war hopes fierce and strange;
Our iron Chicagos and our grimy mines
Rumble with hate and love and solemn change.

Too many weary men shed honest tears,
Ground by machines that give the Senate ease.
Too many little babes with bleeding hands
Have heaped the fruits of empire on your knees.

Poetry is the Antithesis of Fascist Terror

In my humble opinion, the extremist religions work together with government and the ruling class to repress and supress and enslave and rob "the people".
It all is a question of freedom versus control.
We know that between Madison Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue and K Street, that the values we hold dear have been manipulated and prostituted and garbaged.
All that remains is happy-shiny glossy lies for the willing sheep, and dark debilitating anger for the rest of us who really once cared.

Someone wise once said:
"No poetry after Auschwitz."
But he was wrong.
No poetry is what the militarist, dominionist, and terrorist want.
Because militarism, dominionism, and terrorism are all death dealers.

After September 11, 2001, poets contained the only light I saw in the world.
Sharon Olds refused an invitation from Pickles to tea at the White House.
The poets of America began a project to write and collect meaningful poetry.
It took years for Americans to begin questioning again, but the poets never lost their souls. Their brains still worked in tandem with their hearts.

I copied this essay then, and run across it once in a while. Posting here as well as on my poetry pages, because I'm sure you wonder why I post my long pieces of boring poetry and then you click right past them.
Well, this piece is prose and easily read.
Say what you will, art makes us human, has a place, and we will need it again...maybe sooner than you think.
After all, our watchdogs in the CIA have predicted a big terrorist incident in the contiguous USA in the next few months.
And if we're fighting them over there to keep from fighting them here, maybe the big hinge of history incident could happen over there... to our idolized troops or maybe a ship in the gulf. Placed like pawns where they can be manipulated for the Great Game.

All Hat-No Cattle Dubya is all set to play his last apocalyptic hand in Iran/Syria. According to the White House astrologers during Mercury retrograde, and according to the Pentagon war-gamers February through April.
And the majority of the people are weary of war, balking.
America just Needs Another Pearl Harbor to turn us into solid flaming fascists.

And the rest of us will need poetry.

September 27, 2001
Disaster Calls Poetry to Action; Auden's Verses Are Back
at Workby Sven Bikerts

I teach two writing courses at Mt. Holyoke College, normally an orderly drill in which I try to supply useful strategies for a series of expressive tasks.

But of course "normally" vaporized this year as soon as the semester began, and I found myself, like every teacher in the country, faced with the question of how to proceed with my course, the premises of my subject, in the face of a collective sadness and unease unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

Meeting my creative-writing class last week for the first time since the disaster, I brought in copies of W.H. Auden’s "September 1, 1939," a poem that’s been everywhere in the air these last days. I thought that if my students didn’t know it, they should. And as I was reading out the later lines of the opening stanza—

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.

I felt, I thought I felt, an attentiveness in the room that went beyond the usual open-eyed, if sometimes undiscriminating, receptivity. I had the sense that the words, to paraphrase a line from another Auden poem, were hurting and connecting.

We did not go on, as I’d thought we might, to talk about the poem. Instead, somehow, we got onto the question of the place of poetry—and, by extension, literature—in the face of the unspeakable. Why read or study it? What does it give us? Can words arranged on a page make a difference? Of course, I had to cite T.W. Adorno’s famous dictum: "No poetry after Auschwitz." What could that mean?

Expressions around the room were mostly baffled. I wanted to break the question down. Did Adorno mean "no poetry" because we should not write it? Because the writing of poems celebrated the human in ways that had become unconscionable? Or because the assertion of purpose and inner coherence that poetry necessarily represents was somehow wrong, no longer viable? Or did Adorno mean "no poetry" because we could not? Because an extreme of barbarism had revealed language to be inadequate, limited in what it could represent? Because barbarism had thus undermined the core assumption of the enterprise? But why single out poetry? Everything is ultimately limited. One might as well mark the enormity of moral devastation by insisting no anything.

Which becomes, of course, a paper argument, carried on in the face of human contrariness, the biological persistence that will rebuild the world no matter how many times it’s torn apart. The argument about the writing and reading of poetry is also finally academic. No poetry after Auschwitz. Except that there was and there is: Akhmatova, Milosz, Bishop, Brodsky, Heaney, Lowell, Walcott, Plath, Herbert and thousands of others. Poetry has flourished since the time of the death camps, and not because it has looked away. It hasn’t.

Problem solved. Except, alas, that it continued to vex, as it must now that the world has been torn apart again. Must, for asking the question is a way of addressing the pain, the very real sense of hopelessness that floods me over and over throughout the day. What is the place, the purpose, of poetry? I was asking it again that afternoon as I blazed my way east on the Mass Pike, lost in a thought fugue rare even for me, who am given to thought fugues on these long commutes. And by the time I reached the outskirts of Boston, I had a kind of answer.

It took a while to get there. My first thought, contra Adorno, was that disaster requires poetry precisely because of the implied perspective it—all literature—assumes: the seriousness and ongoing point of all things, however fragile the web of meaning may seem at times; and because poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication. As I’d just declaimed to my class from Auden:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages

But then I had another, less expected idea. To understand the use of poetry, its particular importance in times like this, I realized, we need to understand the nature of trauma. This is a subject for deep study, of course, but a few generalizations are possible. To begin with, catastrophic trauma shatters norms; it upsets, in a way that feels permanent, the balance of things. It overwhelms our psychic system, melting down the usual response mechanisms whereby experiences are organized and stored as the stuff of memory. Further, this trauma creates for itself a kind of perpetual present. What is post-traumatic stress disorder but the psyche’s inability to banish hurt to the past? In the sufferer—and we are now all to some degree sufferers—the pain stays alive, there to be activated at any moment. The plane keeps slicing into the building, each time fresh; it doesn’t stop. We don’t even need to see the loop any more.

And this, I thought, is where poetry comes in. Poetry does not, with its meanings and messages, defeat trauma; it does not argue it away with its countervailing sense of purpose. Nothing so simple: Poetry works on a deeper level. Because it mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor, reading it—the best of it—can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.

For poetry is the reverse of the terrorist act, its antithesis—just as the terrorist act is the complete negation of the spirit of poetry. We read poetry because we need something to hold against horror, something to place alongside it that is equally persistent. Not because poetry overturns or disarms horror, but because it helps restore the delicate inner balance we call sanity.

And when this balance, this instinctive sense of moral proportion, is threatened—as it is now—we need poetry in the worst way. Shakespeare asked: "How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?" A rhetorical question. He knew. As did Auden, who in that most sustaining poem, with a modesty that seems to me just slightly disingenuous, wrote:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Auden would not allow that poem to be reprinted in his Collected Poems, arguing that "We must love one another or die" was misleading, a false choice. I’ve always wondered where this sudden literalism came from, this misplaced sense of scruple. It’s his best line.

This column ran on page 1 in the 10/1/2001 edition of The New York Observer.

history repeats itself

If corporations have personhood, then ideas are gods.

The Mask of Anarchy
Written on the occasion of the massacre at Manchester
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Lord Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, and spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
"I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!"

With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude.

And with a mighty troop around
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.

And with glorious triumph they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.

O'er fields and towns, from sea to sea,
Passed the Pageant swift and free,
Tearing up, and trampling down;
Till they came to London town.

And each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken
Hearing the tempestuous cry
Of the triumph of Anarchy.

For from pomp to meet him came,
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired murderers, who did sing
'Thou art God, and Law, and King.

'We have waited weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold.’

Lawyers and priests a motley crowd,
To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud,
Whispering—‘Thou art Law and God.’—

Then all cried with one accord,
‘Thou art King, and God, and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!’

And Anarchy, the Skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.

For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the sceptre, crown, and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.

So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower,
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned Parliament

When one fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said:
But she looked more like Despair,
And she cried out in the air:

'My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!

'He has had child after child,
And the dust of death is piled
Over every one but me—
Misery, oh, Misery!'

Then she lay down in the street,
Right before the horses feet,
Expecting, with a patient eye,
Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.

When between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose.
Small at first, and weak, and frail
Like the vapour of a vale:

Till as clouds grow on the blast,
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,
And glare with lightnings as they fly,
And speak in thunder to the sky.

It grew—a Shape arrayed in mail
Brighter than the viper’s scale,
And upborne on wings whose grain
Was as the light of sunny rain.

On its helm, seen far away,
A planet, like the Morning's, lay;
And those plumes its light rained through
Like a shower of crimson dew.

With step as soft as wind it passed
O'er the heads of men - so fast
That they knew the presence there,
And looked, - but all was empty air.

As flowers beneath May's footstep waken,
As stars from Night's loose hair are shaken,
As waves arise when loud winds call,
Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall.

And the prostrate multitude
Looked - and ankle-deep in blood,
Hope, that maiden most serene,
Was walking with a quiet mien:

And Anarchy, the ghastly birth,
Lay dead earth upon the earth;
The Horse of Death tameless as wind
Fled, and with his hoofs did grind
To dust the murderers thronged behind.

A rushing light of clouds and splendour,
A sense awakening and yet tender
Was heard and felt - and at its close
These words of joy and fear arose

As if their own indignant Earth
Which gave the sons of England birth
Had felt their blood upon her brow,
And shuddering with a mother's throe

Had turned every drop of blood
By which her face had been bedewed
To an accent unwithstood,-
As if her heart cried out aloud:

'Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.

'What is Freedom? ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well—
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.

''Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell,

'So that ye for them are made
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,
With or without your own will bent
To their defence and nourishment.

''Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak, -
They are dying whilst I speak.

''Tis to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye;

''Tis to let the Ghost of Gold
Take from Toil a thousandfold
More than e'er its substance could
In the tyrannies of old.

'Paper coin - that forgery
Of the title-deeds, which ye
Hold to something from the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.

''Tis to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.

'And at length when ye complain
With a murmur weak and vain
'Tis to see the Tyrant's crew
Ride over your wives and you -
Blood is on the grass like dew.

'Then it is to feel revenge
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
Blood for blood - and wrong for wrong -
Do not thus when ye are strong.

'Birds find rest, in narrow nest
When weary of their winged quest;
Beasts find fare, in woody lair
When storm and snow are in the air.

'Horses, oxen, have a home,
When from daily toil they come;
Household dogs, when the wind roars,
Find a home within warm doors.
Asses, swine, have litter spread
And with fitting food are fed;
All things have a home but one -
Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none!'

'This is Slavery - savage men,
Or wild beasts within a den
Would endure not as ye do -
But such ills they never knew.

'What art thou, Freedom? O! could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand - tyrants would flee
Like a dream's imagery:
'Thou are not, as impostors say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.

'For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
In a neat and happy home.
Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude -
No - in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.

'To the rich thou art a check,
When his foot is on the neck
Of his victim, thou dost make
That he treads upon a snake.

'Thou art Justice - ne’er for gold
May thy righteous laws be sold
As laws are in England—thou
Shield’st alike both high and low.

‘Thou art Wisdom—Freemen never
Dream that God will damn for ever
All who think those things untrue
Of which Priests make such ado.

‘Thou art Peace—never by thee
Would blood and treasure wasted be
As tyrants wasted them, when all
Leagued to quench thy flame in Gaul.

'What if English toil and blood
Was poured forth, even as a flood ?
It availed, Oh, Liberty.
To dim, but not extinguish thee.

'Thou art Love—the rich have kissed
Thy feet, and like him following Christ,
Give their substance to the free
And through the rough world follow thee,
Or turn their wealth to arms, and make
War for thy beloved sake
On wealth, and war, and fraud - whence they
Drew the power which is their prey.

'Science, Poetry, and Thought
Are thy lamps; they make the lot
Of the dwellers in a cot
So serene, they curse it not.

'Spirit, Patience, Gentleness,
All that can adorn and bless
Art thou - let deeds, not words, express
Thine exceeding loveliness.

'Let a great Assembly be
Of the fearless and the free
On some spot of English ground
Where the plains stretch wide around.

'Let the blue sky overhead,
The green earth on which ye tread,
All that must eternal be
Witness the solemnity.

'From the corners uttermost
Of the bounds of English coast;
From every hut, village, and town
Where those who live and suffer moan
For others' misery or their own,

'From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen,
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain, and weep for cold -

'From the haunts of daily life
Where is waged the daily strife
With common wants and common cares
Which sows the human heart with tares -

'Lastly from the palaces
Where the murmur of distress
Echoes, like the distant sound
Of a wind alive around
Those prison halls of wealth and fashion.
Where some few feel such compassion
For those who groan, and toil, and wail
As must make their brethren pale -

'Ye who suffer woes untold,
Or to feel, or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold—
'Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free -

'Be your strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With their shade to cover ye.

'Let the tyrants pour around
With a quick and startling sound,
Like the loosening of a sea,
Troops of armed emblazonry.

'Let the charged artillery drive
Till the dead air seems alive
With the clash of clanging wheels,
And the tramp of horses' heels.

'Let the fixed bayonet
Gleam with sharp desire to wet
Its bright point in English blood
Looking keen as one for food.

'Let the horsemen's scimitars
Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars
Thirsting to eclipse their burning
In a sea of death and mourning.

'Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war,

'And let Panic, who outspeeds
The career of armed steeds
Pass, a disregarded shade
Through your phalanx undismayed.

'Let the laws of your own land,
Good or ill, between ye stand
Hand to hand, and foot to foot,
Arbiters of the dispute,
'The old laws of England—they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo - Liberty !

'On those who first should violate
Such sacred heralds in their state
Rest the blood that must ensue,
And it will not rest on you.

'And if then the tyrants dare
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew, -
What they like, that let them do.

'With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away.'

'Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

'Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand—
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street.

'And the bold, true warriors
Who have hugged Danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company.

'And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression’s thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain.
Heard again - again - again -

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'

steal this poem

Do you think someone who wrote this would not want it copied and posted?
What have we become?

Catherine Wiley
45 years old

If Nothing Breaks

It is not torture if nothing breaks
if the dog's teeth click without meeting skin
if the bruise is blue but does not turn yellow
if the bile is yellow but does not turn green
if the bone leaves the socket without piercing skin
if eyeballs roll to white but stay inside the sockets
if eyelids close but the tears number less than 20
if electrodes dangle but are not connected
if the noose is never tightened
if pain turns to fear but fear does not turn to pain
if screams do not sound like songs
if we understand they'd do the same or worse to us
if imagination offers something else
if no one takes a picture
if no one writes it down
if no one puts it up online
if no one says no

CHAPBOOK
©2006, Poets Against War, all rights reserved.