Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Linda Brown
From 1970-1990, I taught poetry writing and courses about American women poets at the University of California, San Diego and other colleges in San Diego County. I've written for several alternative newspapers, in 1988 winnning a national award for "Alcohol Is Killing Us," an article about the Blue Bay Recovery Center on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. I currently work in a branch of the San Diego Public Library where I curate the art exhibits and organize cultural events.
Mikayo and the Gulf War
To Mikayo, an emperor among cats
I went to bed early the night we attacked Iraq, was awake an hour later as if someone had tapped my shoulder, said, It's war.
I'd had a war before when I was very young. A siren hung outside my nursery window with its blackout curtains, rumors of German submarines caught in steel nets guarding East Coast harbors.
I don't want to be alone with this, I thought. Mikayo, I mentally called. Mikayo. I went to the front door. At full gallop he came bounding in running so fast he would have smashed his head on wood if I hadn't opened the door just at that moment.
Companion, I have called no human to my side this way: saying your name in my mind, and you came, you came.
1991
Pearl Harbor's Child
I was born a week after Pearl Harbor into a crib with an air raid siren. It wailed nightly from the elm outside until I went rigid as a hypnotist's steel board, too scared--even in my mother's arms--to cry.
We moved cross-country when I was two so my father could build the air strip at Whidbey Island. There I was jumped on by Zombie Doggy, a big red Irish setter who loved me so much he knocked me down. When they practiced firing on the artillery range, Mother had to drive me to the other side of the island because I screamed & cried and cried.
There are two things infants are afraid of: falling and loud noises. This was my baptism into touch and sound--being knocked flat on my back by a dog licking my face, the rage of artillery shells and sirens.
So much fear. What to do for it but become a poet? Still afraid of being knocked on my ass by love, still living in a world at war.
Strange Birds
I noticed them at once because of their fixed wings that neither flapped nor soared. Two of a kind they were, a species I hadn't sighted in the tropics where frigate birds lazily measured the air and pelicans dropped so close to my jungle crow's nest I could see tendons in their wings.
These birds were new to me. Wings stiff to their sides, they traveled very fast as if a grey line suspended in the sky drew them on.
And after them no birdcalls, no cries: a noise of thunder split the sky. They neither dived nor rose but moved out over the ocean as one steady scream.
These were birds that did not eat food or rest on branches. They consumed the bluest air, ate the safety of ants under pine needles and of villagers thousands of miles away. These birds swallowed the small throats of millions of wrens.
The sky over Nayarit has none of these bullets in the air with men strapped inside-- this strange unmated pair, disturbers of a world fragile as an eggshell under the shadow of their wings.
