Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Jennifer Juneau
36 years old
Switzerland
Jennifer Juneau is an American poet and fiction writer residing in Switzerland. Currently she is studying American Literature at University of Zurich.
Aftermath
On the window pane I traced a cake of snow with my finger, mounded it into a ball and imagined I was God holding the fragile universe in my palm. In the white-heavy night each leaf-like flake fell, one after another, like insatiable bombs dropping a nation, wreaking havoc on last year's rose bushes, flattening the flowerbed. God-like and all, from my firey heaven of pale walls and Persian rugs, I assumed the role of spectator. A radiant-white fallout mounted, enough to drown a village, gag the mouth of a cobblestone well. In the morning, all greenery will be demolished. The aftermath of shoveling sidewalks and bones, and skidding through slushed-decked streets will extend its indomitable arms and seize us. All thoughts abolished, I tucked myself inside the warm ribs of midnight and dreamt of pale sand and algid rock lapping up the sun's multi-colored heat, an earth with broken borders waving its one colorless flag.
Social Studies
Why did I come in the dark to find them? the moist soil smooth as butter. I founder underground for bones. What dense air.
I come across a wedding band. Whose past? I find another, and another--it's a diamond mine down here. It's hot and full of history, but so sticky.
Over there another clue. I inch around insects, my belly scrimmages over another war. I find a box of teeth, a wristwatch. I had to be to sure. Finally:
the bones--folded over pink and gray, stacked neatly in rows. And there: little twigs of bones; they must be the children. I press on
to a whole family of bones hankering to be snapped back together. Then something else glinting in the earth. I can't get to it fast enough, is it gold?
Oil? I become greedy--what's it worth? I pick up a gem-studded comb, rearrange my hair, my rings and curl into a stomach of dirt. I leave the bones behind. Somebody please let me out.
Reconstruction
Who will purchase the needle and thread? Who has time to stitch the limbs and hammer together the bones?
How many Americans will eat dollars to buy the fabric to weave the flags to wrap the men and send them home?
