Men of War, Be Gone!
Oct. 2001 – Oct. 2004
Men
of war, be gone
That’s how I wanted to start this poem, in
The thing people are saying
I start instead:
Men of war, we make a garden to defy
you. Gilles the Frenchman
brother of the mother of my child, my daughter’s dark-handsome uncle –
he and I dig rows for potatoes, leek, tomatoes, and on a sunny day we pick
strawberries
And
we said to each other, in French and English and then in nothing and maybe
laughing
I had once, my entire life, been eating out
of packages bought from stores
Am I to judge the men of war who feed me? O
package! Shall I find you hidden and
shake your hand and blow up in excitement?
Thunder hid in a cloud, and then the cloud
became the shape of the jaw of men with big ideas
Scribblers who tell all in History will
forget much they’ve seen
For example: two men, rows of potatoes, old
communist garden in cracked soil
Windy hill near
On clouds that dump rain that the two men
wait for, having for this bud toiled
For
example: while digging with a hoe in Gilles’s garden I dreamed a second Deluge,
but
Noah
was locked in a big white room in
Gilles and I grabbed each other for the
coming flood
We grabbed our fathers alive and dead, and
our mothers who we loved who were mad
We grabbed our girlfriends, and our children
who lived and were to be
In glass-lit foam the streets beneath us
moved from side to side, the towers began to sway
The world was eaten at last in self-hood
-Christopher
Ketcham