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    Operation Support Tyranny..., 2003-04-01 03:25:45 | Main | Half a week wasn't long enough, but it's all I got..., 2003-04-04 06:17:09

    Abroad for a week:

    bound for the dark heart of Illinois. In the meantime, consider this:

    Machine Pastoral
    
    "With each advent of spring, when the air is alive with innumerable
    happy creatures; when the storks on their arrival at their old northern
    resorts fold up the imposing flying apparatus which has carried them
    thousands of miles, lay back their heads and announce their arrival by
    joyously rattling their beaks; when the swallows have made their entry
    and hurry through our streets and pass our windows in sailing flight;
    when the lark appears as a dot in the ether and manifests its joy of
    existence by its song; then a certain desire takes possession of man. He
    longs to soar upward and to glide, free as the bird, over smiling
    fields, leafy woods and mirror-like lakes, and so enjoy the varying
    landscape as fully as only a bird can do."
      --Otto Lilienthal, "Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation"
    
    Birdship sing
    our want.  Beasts of the
    sea tongue
    
    our dry stone's skip of land.  We have beat you
    steel gorgons to break borders
    negotiated in the palor
    of our tender skin.  Human,
    
    would you own
    freedom in tarnished metal,
    bleed power from bodies
    blessed with flight?
    
                            "twenty times
    I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
    And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
    Went heaving through the water like a swan -
    When, from behind that rocky steep (till then
    The bound of the horizon), a huge cliff
    As if with voluntary power instinct,
    Upreared its head."
    
                    The jungle bares yellow teeth.
                    The lion and cheetah clutch loose earth
                    soldered to the dark kingdom.
    
    Silver glints in the eye, polished by hands
    manicured white.  The tongue
    tastes of metal.  The hands have held
    cheetah haunch as an engine.  The body
    has burned the whale road in the steel
    stomach of a false god.  A god like a bullet.
    
    There is ________ we have not known.
    
    "Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
    Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
    The zebra stripes along his jaw
    Swelling to maculate giraffe."
    
    You cannot swim far or fly free.
                            You know only
    animal lust and the impulse to revenge.
    Bigot, you have chased your
                            monsters, yet one
    chases still.  She is holding
    open heavy pages
    which bear the prophecy of
    the One God.  O. G.
    
    At dinner, Cole asked,
    
    "What is it about
    humans that makes them want
    to build a bomb?  How did it
    happen? The shape.  The
    explosion.  What is it?"
    
    I said
    there was a bullet
    in the Civil War
                            that exploded
    on impact.  Accident.
    
    There is an animal
                              which flies through the air,
    suicidal,
            bent on destruction.
    
    There are fields
    where men were killed, where
    geese graze in grass
                                scattered with a century
    of bullets.
    
    The sun shines there as it does
    on asphalt.
    
    It is great.  The sun is a great god.
                                                  Ra, your beak
    can spike the land.
    It mocks you.  It calls to you
    for vengeance.                  It has been waiting for another
    beast to tame
    into ignorant metal.
    The great cliff
    hangs above our heads.
    
    We are crouching in its shadow.  We have waited long enough.
    
                                      -Heather Pollock, © 2003
    


:: posted by buermann @ 2003-04-01 05:15:28 CST | link





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Enforcing
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Oil for Nothing:
US Holds On Humanitarian Supplies
Iraq: 1997-2001


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The Autobiography
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