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While I Was Gone a War Began

While I was gone a war began.
Every day I asked friends in Rome
to translate the news.
It seems I saw this story
in a Hollywood movie,
or on a Taco Bell commercial,
maybe in an ad for sunglasses
or summer wear--shown somewhere
for promotional purposes.

Hadn't I seen it in an underground cartoon,
a sinister sheikh versus John Wayne?
Remembering Revelation I wanted to laugh,
the way a nonbeliever remembers Sunday School
and laughs, which is to say--after flood and rains,
drought and despair,
abrupt invasions,
disease and famine everywhere,
we’re still left dumbfounded
at the persistence of fiction.

While I was gone
continents exploded--the Congo, Ireland,
Mexico, to name a few places.
At this rate, one day soon
they won’t exist at all.
It’s only a speculation, of course.

"What good have all the great writers done?"
an Italian dissident asked, as if
this new war were my personal charge.
"What good your poems,
your good intentions,
your thoughts and words
all for the common good?
What lives have they saved?
What mouths do they feed?
What good is your blue passport
when your American plane blows up?"
the Italian dissident asked in a rage.
Forced out of his country,the poor African selling trinkets in Italy,
does not hesitate to kill other blacksnot of his tribe.
Who is the bad guy? Who is the last racist?
Who colonized in the twenty-first century best:
the Mexican official over the Indian
or the gringo ranchero over the Mexican illegal?
"I hope for your sake yourpoems become missiles,"
the dissident said. He lit a cigarette, held it to his yellowed teeth.
"I hope for my sake, too. I tried," he said.
"I did not write books or have sons
but I gave my life
and now, I don’t care.
"Again, I had nothing to give but a few words
which I thought then to keep to myself
for all their apparent uselessness.
We drank some wine, instead,
made from his dead father's vineyard.
We trapped a rat getting into the vat.
We watched another red sun set over the fields.
At dawn, I left,returned to the silence of the press
when it has no sordid scandal to report.
As if we should not be scandalized
by surprise bombing over any city at night,
bombs scandalizing the sanctity of night.

–1998, Chicago


Women Don't Riot
(For N.B.S)

Women don't riot,
not in maquilas in Malaysia, Mexico, or Korea,
not in sweatshops in New York or El Paso.
They don't revolt
in kitchens, laundries, or nurseries.
Not by the hundreds or thousands, changing
sheets in hotels or in laundries
when scalded by hot water,
not in restaurants where they clean and clean
and clean their hands raw.

Women don't riot, not sober and earnest,
or high and strung out, not of any color,
any race, not the rich, poor,
or those in between. And mothers of all kinds
especially don't run rampant through the streets.

In college those who've thought it out
join hands in crucial times, carry signs,
are dragged away in protest.
We pass out petitions, organize a civilized vigil,
return to work the next day.

We women are sterilized, have more children
than they can feed,
don't speak the official language,
want things they see on TV,
would like to own a TV—
women who were molested as children
raped,
beaten,
harassed, which means
every last one sooner or later;
women who've defended themselves
and women who can't or don't know how
we don't—won't ever rise up in arms.

We don't storm through cities,
take over the press, make a unified statement,
once and for all: A third-millennium call—
from this day on no more, not me, not my daughter,
not her daughter either.

Women don't form a battalion, march arm in arm
across continents bound
by the same tongue, same food or lack thereof,
same God, same abandonment,
same broken heart,
raising children on our own, have
so much endless misery in common
that must stop
not for one woman or every woman,
but for the sake of us all.

Quietly, instead, one and each takes the offense,
rejection, bureaucratic dismissal, disease
that should not have been, insult,
shove, blow to the head,
a knife at her throat.
She won't fight, she won't even scream—
taught as she's been
to be brought down as if by surprise.
She'll die like an ant beneath a passing heel.
Today it was her. Next time who.

—1998, Chicago