Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Susan McKeon-Steinmann
58 years old
Long Island NY
I am a person who fought against the war in Vietnam for years and years and years. All this time I have written on old paper bags, napkins, leaflet othersides. Whatever was handy. It was my writing that kept me focused. Someday, it will not be a dream: there will be peace in the world because the evolved people of the world will not allow war.
Seeds of Kent State
I. Requiem for a Rose Bush that Grows Somewhere Between Kent and Jackson
Frail, pink as carmine grave rose grow sweet as Allison delicate as a father's tears what went into solve flowing, braces, prom clothes worry, first dates pregnant age little girl play shouts, birthday movie cakes the tiny roses cover her shroud of party dress she never wore, only war, they typed her "all bums", they killed her on the third day her dream molded. the tiny marker shouts around the world, the pigs have finally lynched a rose.
Mail seeds like the holly stained the red clay gravel empty path a wife's tears shed in Jackson. white bullets, or so it seemed, tore into the breast, two times, gospel singer student they never mentioned what he would have been or even what he was, two times, they tore his face, the darker rose its thorns put on by life, his mother watched the shack gray boarded hillside time tree swing of childhood try to kill him, it did not he watched his brothers, shack and college brothers and he would not die, the segregated cemetary sees the pink rose blush red as the future flame in the night
A small marker-Gibbs-Krause-dead brother and sister 1970's waste. A tired postal worker's feet walk questions into the land-How Long?
The seeds of the peace martyrs have borne fruit
We stand in the early nipping chill handing flyers to bleary-eyed commuters running for the train. Ronkonkama, the name a left-over from our native past. Will our culture be a left-over? as more and more of our rights get taken in the name of the Homeland.
My homeland is here in the shadow of pine trees,in Wading River in darkness as the peace candles flicker. My homeland all races and beliefs standing along Nicolls Road in Setauket, signs as cars flash by, Honk for peace, the peace sign is given and the finger. My homeland is in Northport with the flute player for peace, in Coram in front of the Congressional office, It stands in Sag Harbor mourning in black with the women, My homeland is in the streets of Washington standing in the shadow of Martin and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Father Berrigan, Citizens with heart refusing to accept thousands killed, tens of thousands made sick, hundreds of thousands, millions living in terror in the name of an American Imperial policy. and I feel not one child, not one soldier is worth the ururpation of someone else's oil field.
We are on a ship of state, careening wildly toward disaster, taking us to an unknown destructive future, There are mutinous feelings in the hearts of many. The captain has gone mad.
Joy in a Time of Horror
And so we are dug in We pick our bits of happiness like almonds plucked from a New Year's cake. Savoring them the taste in our mouths, while our hearts are assaulted with fellow souls turned into statistics, collaterally damaged, a dehumanized environment some led down the path programmed into a "Kill the Arabs" mentality, people who know not about Arabs or Muslims, Sunis or Shiites, Pashtuns or Afghans. Who know not even about our own history.
Nebuchadnezzar's empire fell never to be resurrected, in the dust, like Bush's empire will be. Trying to guard our fundamental freedoms in a time of simplistic fundamentalism without room for the value, the shining quality of one life, are we to be turned into dross?
Like sprouting shoots we protect our humanity while we kiss our lovers, hug the young, our children and grandchildren, and dance to hopeful melodies. And hold out yet one more leaflet as we try to change hearts and minds,
like maple seeds twirling in the sunlight, Not landing yet, but with the life force safely tucked inside them. Confident with the assurance that some will grow.
The Sandpiper
a sandpiper on tiny feet rushes up the beach the surf inches from his quest he moves forward undeterred by the power of ocean waves at his back,
a mother sitting at water's edge helps her daughter dig a castle moat, a blond boy points at a man cleaning the beach with a backhoe sweeper his plastic Tonka momentarily abandoned, the middle son tugging on Mom to look at his work.
as the sandpiper labors, the driver cleans, the mother directs and nurtures creative play the use of nuclear weapons is again presented as a thinkable option at this very moment.
Shelter Drills and Other 50's Delusions (A Poem Read at Hiroshima Day Commemoration at Bellport Waterfront August 6,2003)
Hunched down under the desk at six, I knew if nuclear war came The desk would fall on me or melt. I knew standing in the hall covering my face as though I had done something wrong and had a guilty secret, I leaned into the wall, away from glass, and I knew the wall would fall on me with tons of bricks in the old Heston Street School in Philadelphia. And I knew the glass would revert into its original components, melted and fused like sand in a glassblower's oven.
I had heard about the Hiroshima maidens and seen one on T.V. Years later still scarred after countless skin grafts with the experience of looking at the flash for a second, her whole family was gone, shadow mist on a stone wall. When Women Strike for Peace went to the House UnAmerican Committee with gladiolas like swords and roses like talismen against the mean men of the House Committee, I laughed that they were terrified of the children. The Committee couldn't understand crying babies or toddlers running up and down the aisle, in that presence their most profound statement.
WSP stopped the testing and strontium stopped infesting their babies' milk, for a while teeth and bones were safe. In Peekskill, a sign on my lawn said Nuclear Free Zone, Support the Freeze and thousands demonstrated against nukes and nuclear testing in New Hampshire and Battery Park. Shoreham was closed, but the half-life of what has been stored at Indian Point is a by-product for thousands of years. The Clam Shell and Shad Alliances led millions. It was not because of boredom, but whispers of nuclear winter, bone cancer and the reverse infinity of fallout.
The veterans who went to Japan in the aftermath of the devastation are still dying, their graves forgotten. Like Dead babies clutched to Hiroshima mothers' breasts, Iraq babies still dying from depleted uranium. Children wandering in the rubble looking for parents who are only shadows in an x-ray second vaporized Civilians who did nothing, but had the misfortune to be born in an undemocratic country with empiric aspirations. How does the fallout distinguish between the general, the air corps, the children in the nursery or the fishermen trolling from their rowboats?
Now the cold fear and my remembered orange nightmares return. The resident of the White House wants to send nuclear weapons orbiting around the planet, exploding under the ground, testing above the earth's delicate crust. Are the computers that will run the sequence of their travel foolproof? Will another nation feel we threaten them, the same as our government felt Japan threatened us? The only protection is peace and the treaties the President has refused to support. Hold your children especially close in this beautiful twilight, listen to the lap of the water. Let us not replace that gentle sound with the screams of the innocent like in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Saving Long Island
It is said that all global wisdom is played out locally
perhaps it's the Pine Barrens threatened by the developer's backhoes
ocean swept dunes shoveled away
perhaps it's Grumman's desires to turn the Island again into a strategic place of military manufacture rather than peace-based jobs
It is painful to live where the major industry is making efficient killing devices.
perhaps it's the politician in Brookhave who wraps himself in the flag and steals millions of taxpayer money silently closing the food pantries, and cutting school programs.
the guy who gets out campaign literature about "outsiders from anywhere" using our beaches.
I want Nature's beaches, a celestial gift, to be there for anyone to use.
Why must you have a pedigree to swim in the Atlantic.
The Shinnecock have been tolerant of all of us
outsiders taking their land and leaving a tiny piece
The ocean's stormy waves sweep away the heat of politicians' hot-air and provide a cooling sandy blanket on which all of God's children can build sand castles.
For my Grandson Devon
Tiny baby growing fat Your Mom with her dignified Mayan face Looking at me with alert brown eyes blinking with my son's curly lashes. What kind of world do we give you? Will you be respected and loved outside your family? Will you be judged an outsider by strangers? Will you be jumped if feeling your family's love, you confidently stray into an all white neighborhood or a changing one like Farmingville? What kind of world are we giving you? Millions spent on destroying another locale with beautiful children that never raised a finger or baby's murmur to us. A pittance for the needs of babies, and growing children's minds. The kind of world will be determined by the steps we take however halting as we train Devon to walk, smile, laugh and play, and fight for his rights.
The Day No Press Came-Rhodora Revisited
At sundown when blue-black clouds and fading clear sky fought for supremacy, we vigiled as the intermittent raindrops tried to put out our candles
No press came
Some of the thirty were children one boy with a soft cheeked face upturned to the damp cold held a sign "Bring Our Troops Home", his Russian flapped cap unsnapped cheeks getting red with the air. Two little girls who had made their own signs standing together away from adults, I don't know who they came with, had signs "Wake up America" and "Remember Truth?" There they were future seeds of the next decades peace movement growing in the rain.
No press came
We read the names of the dead, the coalition of the unwilling's dead, those drafted by lies, the economy and young dreams of doing something for others, multi-ethnic names and we alternated them with the names we had of Iraqi children and families putting names and ages to our so-called enemy, and it was colder than the night as we read those human names for more than two hours.
Silent people stood dressed warm as the rain tried to assault us. Three police stopped by from Patchogue Village and after we whispered what we were about they went on their way and let us stand our being there a confusion and a challenge. Only one heckler at the beginning who shouted out "War is good", a teenager who the recruiters would love to send to this waste of youth and love.
I could not retain the names because there were so many, each a family, each tears shed in private for so many only the ages of the children in Iraq remained with me, two, two months, seven years of age, and the name unreporteds yet of this week and the dates they died, so many Spanish sounding names, so many deep South names, so many plain Midwestern names of the Plains states, so many ethnic names, Russian and Polish and Irish, and derivations I couldn't divine.
No press came.
The rain trickled a few seconds and then stopped and the gray held it at bay.
We were there, cars slowed down, sometimes honked, loud music on the edge of our consciousness, and there was something so precious about these Americans who quietly stood reading then names of people they did not know but were connected with so strongly cut down strong in their youth,
and no press came.
The veteran who wore his jacket with flags and an Impeach Bush sticker had pain etched on his face each name like a lash on his soul and he sometimes flinched as though he was being struck in the face. Those cars that slowed to heckle saw our black armbands and heard the drone of the names and pulled away.
I shifted my position so I could see who we were standing there and recognized some I knew and many I did not only recognized the sweet common kindness of spiritual people whose belief impels them to stand in the street witnessing for a need as basic as food or air.
And if we are not printed or recorded by "newsmen" yet we were still there a reality as lasting as the redwoods. And we will be back again and as often as necessary until these dead fellow brothers and sisters are recognized and the cost of this war is not hidden in flags, lies and pompous words about their sacrifice. Their beauty as tender as the little white flower with delicate pink insides standing on the mossy forest floor,
and they will be recognized.
I am still on my corner in Patchogue
It's sacred ground A place where the names are read Just last week, the third massacred soldier from Brentwood. He has a Spanish surname. The rich are not fighting this war. They send the recruiters to our working class and poor neighborhoods to pluck our children, eighteen, nineteen, twenty before they've had a chance to evaluate what life is; they are gone.
We are still here, and we see cars cruising by on Sunday in the dark as our candles flicker. Only a few obscenities supporting the greater one. Many more waves, honks and two thank you's for what you are doing. This week a heartfelt thank you, a smile and a wave. We had twenty at vigil this week, our candles placed on the ground and clutched in chilly hands.
They chose me to read the Iraqi counterpoint of names this week. It is amazing what a little linguistic training will do. The names rolled too comfortably off my tongue. Names gleaned from the press and the Body Count, some ages of babies.
These tender Muslim babies are like armor to those deluded teenagers who yell Kill them all. One foot across the swearing in line, maybe or perhaps they have absorbed from their parents the transparent-fragile device of urging kills and staying as far away from war as possible as they send the Brentwood young of color to die, hoping for a future.
We are still here on our corner, my friends and I as I think of Jacob Fletcher, nineteen, and Salima, five years old swept away. Our earth's children swept away in a honk and an epithet.
We will be standing on this corner until the killing is over, and snatches of the music on car radios become loud and joyous songs of peace.
We march to the polls singing solidarity forever
I have a vision and a crazy fantasy
informed by Eminem of all people moshing with the young.
of millions of Americans marching to the polls singing Solidarity Forever or the Battle Hymn of the Republic
and pushing the Bush Dark Ages out of the way.
Last night we were at our corner again memorializing the dead, American and Iraqi. Our candles flickered and we got many supportive honks and waves.
The opposition yelled one word - Bush.
How strange. Do they instinctively know that Bush is against the American soldiers as well as Iraqi children. Do they think that it's traitorous to say the names of the real dead soldiers and innocent Iraqis aloud.
Do they even know what they are saying.
As we stook there silent, Families walked by with their children trick or treating, and smiled at us. Perhaps they realized that this Halloween the scariest concept is Bush for another four.
I face that like I did Nixon's violence and Reagan's anti-peace and people agenda. I refuse to let fear control me even though I am afraid inside. Afraid for those little children with their pumpkins and smiles. Afraid for my own and my grandson.
My joy is that the young have picked up the sign from me and help me carry it now. When I leave there will still be a peace movement. People will still stand for the idea that at this stage of humanity, peace is a possibility and a birthright.
I have already voted, but I go to the polls as a poll inspector. If anyone dares harass voters there, I will politely and firmly throw them out as my heart sings the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
God Bless all the young and growing, loves and hopes, you are my mirror as I was. Time has not devoured me into acceptance or cynicism. I am a little scared, but I still go on hopeful and expectant that tomorrow morning the sun will come up pink-orange kissing the earth with its sweet coral light.
The Leaves Have Fallen and Life Regenerates Under the Snow
Fall
I saw a yellow oak leaf yesterday in the gust of a wind swirl downward a slow spiral catching the light at each temporary halt
It was such a graceful descent, finite and pure in its integrity calling on winter's advent and irretrievably spring's nascent arrival.
a world distant heat filled and crisp young soldiers move out into a battle against a foe defending its own land, sacrificial blown away leveling people, hospitals,playgrounds and shadowing families in both worlds.
Could it be that we are the weather change like the falling leaf. Could it be that we anticipate a time when war will be an anachronism Could it be that in this coldest Valley Forge of life there is an early blooming bud preceded by the leaf's fall.
We will not fall noiselessly.
My Mind is With the People of Fallujah
As I hear my dog bark in the pen outside.
As I hear the November cold rustling the last of the leaves, tumbling on the ground
As I watch the hours of my workday tick by here in the house
Doing laundry,
Writing the bills,
Figuring Out what to Cook for Dinner,
Sending out the flyer for witness against this horror.
Washing the dishes,
Taking my bath, and checking my blood sugar
I imagine houses falling on people who are trapped by the curfew
Who did nothing but be in the wrong place at the wrond time
Like our own victims at the World Trade Center,
I imagine mothers knowing that their children will probably die in the bombardment, looking at their five year old and wondering where can I go.
I visualize nineteen year old American boys barely More than peach fuzz on their faces, those tell-tale Delicate mustaches that teenage boys have told by Much more seasoned combat commanders that they Must shoot anything that moves in that building
And they fear they must because there is no way Out in the dance of death arranged by others, They too are trapped because they too are afraid To die.
The ones who created this catastrophe are comfortable And safe.
I see orange clouds of explosives like fiery mushrooms Old men running as best they can hands up in supplication Frightened men clutching their guns, looking out of tank Turrets and they are ours, and so are all the people they kill They are ours.
In my mind, in my heart there are tears, that each minute Prolongs the agony for them, for my brothers, my sisters, My mind is with the people in Fallujah.
Patchogue in January
This month on our corner thirteen souls stood against the waste
Many hornhonks of approval punctuated our counterpoint of the dead Iraqi and American, only one "What about 9/11?" We didn't answer him although under his breath, my friend Richard said "what about it?"
Yesterday at the North Shore vigil, a crazed man jumped out of his pick-up and tried to assault the thirty vigilers. He must have an instinctive feeling that we are peaceful and would not assault him back. As he yelled and tried to get at people, a man with a camera took a picture of his license plate number for our protection in case something terrible happened.
He tried to pull the camera off the man's neck without worrying that the strap was attached. The police had been called and he tried to explain why he had been angry.
We decided not to press charges.
This brings back so much of civil rights non-violent theory.
I did not answer the man about 9/11 today as I might have in the past. I have an answer, but to give it might feed his desire to argue and even cause the kind of violence that occurred yesterday.
Today we stood there and were interviewed by a young local reporter who told us that it was nice to see such spirit in our community.
This tells me we are really succeeding in building community based peace activity.
Shalini brought a friend from church. Nina brought her great-niece.
All of the lovely faces, I have come to know there in the flickering candles were a circle of humanity.
There was the sign announcing that our vigil would read the names of the dead, the horrible toll of war both American and Iraqi, and all the sponsoring groups.
There were signs calling for withdrawal, dissent is patriotic, and talking about the profiteering of the war.
The young reporter spoke to at least one of the two Vietnam veterans with us.
The readers of the names were shaken as I always am, and asked for a prayer or moment of silence to end our vigil and remember them as "real" people with families and friends.
At six after one hour, a reminder came that it was time to stop. Once we had kept reading to the end and it had taken over two hours, so we now alternate names because there are too many to read all at once. I think of the dreams they had and the recruiters who convinced them.
I called for a moment of silence and at the end invited all for the February vigil and gave my affirmation that we will be there until this war ends.
A Sunday in the cold with our local peace people- Young parents,veterans,seniors,a teen,democrats,independents,a registered Republican,a libertarian,some Greens,from seventeen to eighty plus, in the cold, religious and secular, a witness to the offensiveness of war. a witness to the presence of family values here in Patchogue,Long Island.
Reflections on Hiroshima read at Commemoration at Bellport Waterfront 2005
In our prehistory, humans have to work. Some work in cities and take trains and buses. Some work in villages and use donkey carts and oxen.
Scrambling to work, a Brazilian electrician, creative in his hands, A Nagasaki fisherman trolling in the quiet waters, trying to feed his family, A Bagdhad shopkeeper sweeping off the sidewalk, a waiter at the World Trade Center balancing a tray, The tears of a cousin in London, a fireman in New York, a child in Iraq, a wife in Hiroshima are the same rain of grief. Terror can be wreaked not only by a subway bomber or a prison guard who tortures, but by a mushroom cloud that takes human flesh and leaves ash and vaporized shadows in its wake only as a memory. We will be civilized when we react to each travesty the same no matter the culture or color or country of the victim.
Humans love the earth, its sunshine, its skies, its mountains, marshes and birds, its orchids, vines and monkeys, its Sunsets over the desert, its rivers, its canals. All of this a backdrop against which we live our lives. Scenery to the brief time we have.
We will be an evolved species when the definition of OUR encompasses the whole race, not just our own town or family.
At one time slavery was the accepted way of life. Women's subservience was universally accepted. Someday war will be archaic and unacceptable. It is our generation and that of our children who will work toward the time when human history can put the bloodletting and suffering behind us. Here in this exquisitely beautiful finite place we are committed to doing our seedlike part of planting peace for a future time when the harvest will come in. Millions of citizens around our planet have posed a more useful paradigm than war.
The species is evolving.
A Mother Speaks for Her Dead Son
There standing in the desert like heat, proud, sweat on her face, or was it tears, the mother spoke for us all. I've come to speak to the President. He could not even talk about my son, did not know his name when I met him before, and changed the subject when I said how much I missed him.
His smell does not linger anymore in the baby blanket I saved. I only have him in pictures glossy with his bright smile, but cold to the touch in only two dimensions.
I wish that all the mothers would come along this dirt road in Crawford with pictures and effigies of their dead sons and build a funeral pyre to war and say. We will not offer our sons anymore.
You told of hero, and proud, and country, but those steel words do not hold a mother do not tease her or hug her with broad youthful arms.
When they lied to her and her son, they cut off her future, denied her of cuddling his children, took away her comfort in old age and a hand to hold in sickness and death's shadow.
All of the mothers should come and stand with her and say, We will study war no more.
That is the only way the monster of violence and aggression can be curbed. If we refuse to give our sons and daughters anymore.
My Poem Stands Up for Me
When I am scared When the voices of the Law turned inside out Call me a terrorist I who step around ants on the sidewalk Who worships the peace of the Lamb Not the rending of the empiric Lyin'
The voices of heroes of our dreams of Justice call out to me
Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Edna Millay
Like a talisman Alice Walker infuses my trembling words and lionizes my conversations, Squeaking phones, non-secure foreign policies that steal my Homeland, the land of Emma Lazarus, new to our shore, sure of The Dream.
Boots pound war fever on my island baby skin is snatched, sweet smiles only a memory while the body politic burns up with sickness a virus that kills compassion, love and hope.
Government agents question my motives And go to the commemoration to honor Rosa Parks, someone they never knew.
There are voices that speak to my poem Cindy Sheehan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin King sweetly telling me to keep my eyes on the prize
The American mountains are still there strong and purple, The Atlantic provides a shelter for the sandpipers, The Pacific shelters paddling sea lions.
Millions of my countrymen and women reject preemptive empire and corporate foreign policy which profits no one but The powerful.
The bedrock underneath Manhattan, shaken, but sure of the Bill of Rights, calls out to the footsteps of bicycle messengers, Immigrants, housewives and carpenters Steadily trying to build a future for themselves amid the rubble of grasp and grab, spiraling costs, and mounds of lies.
My poem stands up for me and shields me Against destruction, it comforts me in a cell with bars of ignorance and vicious torture. My poem whispers love and just peace, My poem calls Cassandra-like, but foretells a safe future for my grandchildren. My poem surrounds me with belief in Gentle arms and Loving friends My poem stands up for me in reign As falso politics present winning as The only credo. My poem wraps me in surity, secure And sweet. It stands up to despots, dictators, fiends, Liars and fakes My poem shouts freedom My poem towers up and unfolds the banner Of brotherhood and kindness A new policy is being born in the hearts of Our people, And my poem carefully etches its coming In the music of the young.
