Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Tamara Kaye Sellman
Slow Information
You decide to paint something, a portrait, say, of Hitler reclining. Grove of red roses. Blue sky padded with glowing white cumuli. Your daughter’s doll between his fingers. Next to him, a sweating can of Diet Coke.
You first apply the under- painting, gunmetal gray. Then, geometric sketches using slender barrels of coal. Layers of acrylic follow: violet under flesh, carmine edged in evergreen. You let the painting dry in July sun fixed to an easel
while the breeze insinuates Sousa. Parades consume Main Street, where your daughter marches, baton bursting with patriotic streamers. Imagine the way sweat curls the hair at her neck, her brow. You store the painting in the attic. Before she can see.
Before anyone can see. This is the nature of your art— to hide now what will reveal itself later. Dread will pass after you have gone, after she has gone, the kind that reminds us today he will never be gone. One day, soldiers will seize remnants of lost freedom found
in your attic. They will puzzle over what to do with something already buried. You already know how your painting will open time like a window then. Through it, you already hear someone shouting orders, a soda cracking open.
POST-SEPTEMBER 11TH VISION
I looked through an open door the other day
same door that you saw open, everyone was there, we all
watched the rectangular panel fold outward
heard the sinister creaking of it, felt a flooding chill
but told repeatedly we weren’t born in a barn
we wanted to pull the door fast but couldn’t
nor could we help looking through at people walking
up rows of fields under a daylight sky filled with stars
it looked like they were smiling didn't it?
the door remains wide open, not because we all came
to understand we were looking at ourselves
no, some time in the night we finally slept
and the panel like a storm-worn shingle fell
away from hinges was carried off by waving arms of wheat
