Place Poem - Washington, DC

by Dan Vera

All the movies play inside my mind at night:
Loved ones trapped at work or huddled in basements,
The detonation of a dirty bomb -- as if a bomb was ever clean,
The marble halls of Washington mausoleum quiet,
The deaths too long and misery unimaginable,
The further loss of an innocence we never had a right too,
The marshaling of shrill forces of fear to despoil a land of liberties
in progress.

But even in my stolen dreamtime I cannot
Afford the illusion of exception:
I am not the child outside of Baghdad
With the certainty that fire will rain from the sky;
I am not the Israeli woman who must constantly remember
The location of her children's gas masks;
I am not the Palestinian boy or girl or man or woman
Who knows that the blood river will be forced to flow again in reprisal.

I am the resident of Washington, not the citizen, for citizenship
is forever denied me in this place, a testament to racism's iron grip
in this country.
Walk over a bridge or a boundary street if you wish to speak to a citizen.
For all men are created equal, unless they live in the District of Columbia.

And so I cannot mistake this war's bitter irony.
Bitter as ash and grave:

How the cradle of civilization could be flattened to rubble,
-- Ziggurats do not survive in the bottom line of this war's equation.
How a "promised land" can give no more promise than bloodshed.
How a superpower can hold its capitol city hostage in war as in peace.

I sleep in full solidarity with those who defy the ravings of zealots,
Who are in the gunsights and bombsights of madmen,
Be they honored, martyred, or unconstitutionally selected.

I sleep in full solidarity with the targeted,
Who in their night sweats of fear,
Somehow cradle a small light of hope.

The light of that hope is peace.

© 2002 Dan Vera

comment?

HOME | POETRY | UPCOMING READINGS | LINKS | COMMENTS?