Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Cassandra Cleghorn
Letter from the Provinces
“If you’re not with us, you’re irrelevant.” –George W. Bush, Jr. “What we say goes.” –George W. Bush, Sr.
Talking to my mother about the prospect of war makes me want to go to war. Talking to my mother about the space shuttle makes me want the astronauts deaths to have been painful, sustained, makes me want pieces of their charred bodies to have rained down on Texas in recognizable bits, more than ash, more than the airy transmogrification their end surely was. My mother fears war, listens with horror to the President’s sneer. For the most part my mother says things I would say, things I have said, or thought, if only fleetingly. So why when she leaves am I filled with rage? Why do I blaspheme the dead, and those who are about to die?
Until now we were moving in the slowest motion possible. There was all the time in the world to reach for the belt, open the car door, throw yourself out onto the asphalt, knowing that such a choice involved its own scrappy risks; scream until your throat collapsed in upon itself like a paper straw; pray, perhaps, for an intervention before we hit the wall (I can hear the doctor’s cry, "I am a poet! I am. I am. I am a poet, I reaffirmed, ashamed…");
Must I sit still after all? Can no one, finally, bear to hear what another wants, and, having heard, relent from the version of self he’s bent on being? Can no one change another’s course? The Jaws of Death are at the ready.
Statement of Conscience
Even before literal violence is underaken in Iraq, the President's policies have done violence to basic rights and to our language. One thing poets can do is to try to recover fear, grief, and anger as legitimate forms of speech, resources to help us imagine, now, the pain that will come with Bush's war plan.
My words cannot hurt or help those who have already died; but I write in the hope that what we say now may affect the futures of those still alive.
