Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.

Chase Twichell

PLANET OF SMOKE AND CLOUD

The earth could not keep
its dead in storage.
Cirrus, stratus, the sky
sloughed off their cloudy migrations.
Tides of wars spilled back and forth
across the phantom boundaries
in the naturalization of dust to dust,
dust the pale colors of human countries.
In a brilliancy of particles
the atoms combined and recombined,
flashing in the grim kinetics
of the earth dispersed
back into its elements,
and with it everything else:
hydrogen, the rippling fires,
our numberless obsessions
with love and power,
all bathed in the spiritual
phosphorus of the afterglow.
Of all the worlds lost
in the hopeless ascendency
of matter toward God,
one was a fluke of aesthetics.
A hand's rayed bones
could be a bird's wing,
inscrutable fossil
locked in a radiant cinder.

from The Odds, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1986

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