Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Kip Williams
22 years old
Kip Williams is a recent grad school dropout. As an undergraduate, he designed his major in gender, sexuality, and creativity studies, and he is actively engaged in community organizing for nuclear nonproliferation, peace with justice, death penalty abolition, environmental justice, and queer equality and tolerance.
God Bless America
God bless America! And keep her peace - at least here at home on the Western front for the soccer moms and the high school proms and the Peeping Toms: While standing on street corners, praying for justice, I have watched them all watching me through the car windows of Hondas and Hummers and Mercedes Benzes and the other sides of camera lenses and radio speakers and newspaper printers and photographs in sepia tone they have BLOWN up my face, larger than life and less recognizable than the faces of those children they've blown up in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan and man... at least it's all quiet on the Western front.
But you don't see their faces - their unraveled faces protruding like icicles out of your tv screens... but rather, it's my hopes and dreams of peace that these voyeurs like to watch like some freak show COME! SEE THE GRUESOME UNPATRIOT! NEWS AT 6! JUST AFTER THIS WORD FROM OUR CORPORATE SPONSORS...
And man, I was watching myself on tv the other day, through that glass window I was watching my own face, and it was like watching someone else cause the newscaster (a fellow wordmaster) lied faster than the face on either side of that tv screen could keep up with. And for a moment there, I swear I almost mistrusted myself.
Cause in the art of war, poetry is a tank and patriotism and protest are lines of a poem that EXPLODE like missiles in our hearts to repunctuate our question marks with smiley faces and GOD BLESS AMERICA!
But the funny people with their funny skin in their funny countries - they don't have the luxury of our word games because the bombs and missiles there are turning their names into numbers and, although not memories, they're the metaphors for something I call oppression and my Commander in Chief calls Freedom.
I'm on this mission. And it's my radical ambition to break from our violent tradition and I want for y'all to come along but I've got this one condition: the fearless recognition that often, we're worse than wrong. And I might add, it's more than suspicion that for all their talk of salvation, liberation, emancipation... things are ONLY quiet on the Western front.
And when our pretty white children listen to the radio from the safety of their schoolbus on Monday morning, my words will be twisted and censored in the interest of "Homeland Security" and yet it occurs to me that we keep building bombs and setting them free in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan and
