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

Jesse Loesberg

An Ode to Donald Rumsfeld

What really scares me
is that blurry photograph
from the December 8th edition

of The Sunday New York Times,
in which a brown-haired envoy
from America clasps hands with his favorite

Middle-East dictator in 1983.
I’d find it difficult to kill someone
to whom I’d stood close enough

to see his teeth framed by a smile,
and maybe that envoy feels the same way
which is why he’s asking us to do it for him

today, from his swiveling chair buried
inside the Pentagon, many offices
away from the construction site

on the outside wall, where they’re trying
to patch up the burnt-out hole
made by that airplane

carrying all those people.

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