3 poems
from the author of Jeanne d’Antietam
TALEH
to the memory of poets and soldiers who died fighting colonialism
to the Daraawiish commander-poet, Ismaaciil Mire
a prayer for the destruction of the European and U.S. war powers
O—unconditional, beseiged,
Fortified engulfed glister-fold,
Dazzlers, and proto-salt roses,
Dancers, centrifugal roadside
Elegies, joyful as cruelty, dear
Intruder, meet the state-to-be.
Italy is colonial, of governs
Lethal, O, to garnish wealth,
It will blast you, eh, to pieces.
Of course, the fortresses.
Of course the traditions.
Of course, poet-soldiers.
Show colonial administrators
Your teeth, show them, roads
Their bodies roll down to hell.
Britain is colonial, of governs
Lethal, O, shipping regiments
Anywhere, eh, that install fate.
Quattuor vexillum partitions,
Jihad animator, O client fold,
Jackals descended on Dalyare.
What wonder, Jihad of colonizers.
No saltire-necklaced fourth shore.
No Holy See’s Eritrea. No Pappas.
Sucking Boer’s infected root,
Puppets roar, putrefying rot,
Horn marrow, slapstick milk.
Horn’s levers the engulfed level,
Incendiaries, figure-head levellers,
Intruders, morbid desire uniforms.
Corfield slain with his translators.
Corfield bled out with his lackeys.
Corfield’s body strewn to lappets.
Unconditional, force enfeoffed,
Coast-eroded Berbera engulfed,
Salt roses, gulf populace, bear it.
Roadside lamentation, hair sword.
Salt roses, braided and unbraided.
The triplet-stars and poem tactics.
To write a reportage, of the feelings.
To endorse nothing, and sweet love.
To hear the pain of a great suffering.
AND PLINTH: NOTES FROM A DIVINE VIOLENCE
Progress Lighting the Way for Commerce shone, against Bubbly Creek,
Via financial instruments blasted south from Haymarket to Bessemer,
Via a trillion moonlit packing-foam leaves to harvest the fruit of labor,
From the peels, the qlippoth.
”Had I known in 1890
“How long it would take me
“To preserve a park for
“The people against their will I doubt if I would have undertaken it.”
The arrow of progress never arrives while all is, in time, run through.
Aaron struck his staff
To stand, between debt and peonage, the living and the dead, labor,
Supply lines, visible by earth’s curvature, as dispensation fills bellies
To fill uniforms, advertising wages the pants and shirts writhe from.
Futures sawed to dust
In the warehouses, to bear his agnomen, beyond the pier, the wharf, the country.
Montgomery Ward Co., birth of the fulfillment center, death of the closed shop.
Insurance travelers calendar: angel of Progress, Ward Tower, Currier & Ives 1899.
This is how I greet you.
Fantasies about love, lost,
Regained, public gesture
Houses, mausoleums, of
Communal feeling, the imperative
Of moods. Staked upon adoration.
Thine imperative mood,
Capital. Difference and
Repetition, restaurants,
Funerals, & restaurants. You bloody my dreams with processes linear and fatalistic . . .
A sown field is one repeatable row long, which moves acres in an hour, for picking
By the harvests of hands. Shipping land. The snow tunnels, onto the loading zone . . .
The anti-psychotic pill burnishes, what fog clears: 10 billion bullets to expropriate . . .
Lost in reveries — whereas
Life, the cigarette, burning in the trash, the thought did I leave the oven on the gas . . .
The stove is cold where we
Held each other and tried not to turn the knobs one way or another, pining on on
Dreams where recognition
Stations beyond its transit
The chiasmus of romance
Not to abuse the pills that
Keep my sanity’s vergence.
Flees and falls, back to earth, where, by the profanations, let be, can what might.
What can wrought is awful,
How not none are forced to live, forced to fight, to die, in genres of military age,
In workhouses and hours
Apposite to dying’s orchard and opposing grace, outdoors, against self-sacrifice.
Love, thy name is fair copy:
Let us meet where the music composes, where voices drift against civil twilights.
Irreal innocence, oh Lamb
Of God, thy cloven face of
Tradition open, it screams.
In the factory I could separate
My mind from my body.
No maudlin gestures. No evil
Thoughts. Oh sweetheart.
If you thought it was bad before.
The only window brings heaven.
Agape loading dock, seven
Garments dress your body,
No heat, inside a recycling
Factory’s aerosol cans’ exploded-open lung.
Bring real food for Stephen,
Who could not buy a meal,
He was hungry, and said so,
Every paycheck went home, for his mother.
Make time easy for Robert,
Paroled one week out, he told the smoking
Circle that he was a violent re-offender,
When he did not have to tell a solitary soul,
Just like a saint, for us, he bared his life.
The angel cannot say farewell, nor greet you,
The angel cannot call in the meantime.
The angel opens its mouth and it’s snowing.
Countless kinds of weather,
Countless kinds of trouble,
Countless signs of forgiveness, all forgiveless.
A song counters: It’s dawn.
A song counters: to end social death is to
End the world. Dawn be
Damned. Beauty would be justice only if
This world came to end.
The divine violence of clouds knows this.
The divine violence of clouds
Asserts. No more prisons. No more death.
Divine violence has nothing to do with
Storms. I am talking about the clouds, and
The beauty of them is justice.
Life, maudlin, by every inconsolation.
Life, maudlin as revolt, cried, uncried,
Common language.
Be easy. Be merciful.
An old god’s acts against mortal sanctuary
Look out on the day from the supervisor’s
Glass hut’s measured folly,
On your Wish Book, listless
Hands installed at gutters,
To process all goods. Hazards
Do not lift like the weather.
Math says what a history says.
You remain the pip on all the balance sheets,
The tightrope the overman crosses.
Plane tree edging water’s overdraft fee: fowl,
Get clean in it. Shipping catalogue
For miniature Thorne rooms. Model wealth
Behind poor wars, all
Detail, furnishing your memorial’s
Military preservation.
Ward proclaimed the park his legacy to silence the people’s mad war
Of living. He said, “They have made a dumping ground
Of the park, allowed circuses, masked balls and anything else there.”
Air is remote, distant, surveilled in a railyard of time’s preservation.
Stars will to heel. Cold-rolled in steel.
Each worker, a timepiece. No! This is life, this is life. Life! Autumn
Populations cut losses’ percentage from the fund of breath’s polish.
CHILCOT WHITEWASH
This poem is a bit of reportage on Chilcot’s statement on the Iraq Inquiry.
The Iraq Inquiry is 2.6 million words long
and supplies the unspeakable with an
unreadable number of pages in order
to conduct the double-bookkeeping entry
to an exit of war on Iraq, that follows
in each line that appears, that follows
in this poem, conducted by open reportage.
Perhaps, each layer of whitewash will
burn off, and not before appearing entirely.
Sir John Chilcot gave a statement on the Iraq Inquiry, to occasion the date
of the Inquiry’s publication, on 6 July 2016; the statement is twelve
pages long, and is a speech act against understanding the UK’s war on Iraq
from 2003 to 2011. Chilcot’s statement frames “the UK’s policy on
Iraq,” as spurious although he refuses to frame it as “the UK’s war on Iraq.”
The Report, the Iraq Inquiry’s publication, it would not be published,
on the Inquiry’s website, until after Sir John Chilcot finished speaking.
Thus, the Report would bear Chilcot’s name, thus, the Inquiry would
bear Chilcot’s name, and thus, the Report is not what holds the power;
so, it is to Chilcot’s statement we must devote our attention. Botschaft!
To hear Chilcot’s statement, the Iraq Report maintains four conclusions:
(1): “that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful
“options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time
“was not a last resort.” (2): “judgements about the severity of the threat
“posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction —WMD — were presented
“with a certainty that was not justified.” (3): “Despite explicit warnings,
“the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The planning
“and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate.”
(4): “The Government failed to acheive its stated objectives.” To we who
listen closely, Chilcot’s Botschaft lets the war remain, still, the good news.
The word “war,” appears in Sir John Chilcot’s message only two times.
The first time in order to burnish this absolute half-truth: “In 2003,
“for the first time since the Second World War, the United Kingdom
“took part in an invasion and full-scale occupation of a sovereign State.”
This performs ritual by route on the UK’s body politic; whitewash,
piecemeal, of invasions of Egypt and Korea, including the full-scale
occupation of Northern Ireland, amid further post-colonial adventures.
The second time “war,” appears in the Iraq Inquiry is in quotation,
spoken by Blair, in January 2003: “‘the likelihood was war.’” The hood
of likeliness, put over Chilcot’s scapegoat’s head, tied by quotation
marks, holds “war” close, and keeps it restricted, to a past, future fabric,
thus, allots the context of war, in the UK’s policy on Iraq, to a hooded
head of state, alone, so the crowd can world out its own sacrificial body.
To reconstruct the state of Iraq, the Western
coalition assault needed a rockbed
of colonialism, such as: “The invasion and
“subsequent upheaval in Iraq had,
“by July 2009, also resulted in the deaths of
“at least one hundred and fifty thousand
“Iraqis — and probably many more — most
“of them civilians. More than a million
“people were displaced. The people of Iraq
“have suffered greatly.” Colonial powers
worlded an absolute catastrophe, or no, am I
catastrophizing, or not, am I catastrophizing,
is this just catastrophization? And then:
“After the invasion, the UK and the US
“became joint Occupying Powers. For the year
“that followed, Iraq was governed by the
“Coalition Provisional Authority. The UK
“was fully implicated in the Authority’s
“decisions, but struggled to have a decisive
“effect on its policies. The Government’s
“preparations failed to take account of the magnitude
“of the task of stabilizing, administering, and
“reconstructing Iraq, and of the responsibilities which
“were likely to fall to the UK.” In dreams
begin responsibilities. In mimetic desire begins a ritual
sacrifice of peoples, nations, worlds. So world no more.
Chilcot, you are dead now, dead as uncountable Iraqis are,
who you donated a line to, in your gospel, your Botschaft!
Matthew Moore is a poet and translator. His poems appear widely in journals and magazines including Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, the Carolina Quarterly, the Denver Quarterly, Interim, Lana Turner, and Second Stutter. He is the translator of Tomaž Šalamun’s Opera Buffa (Black Ocean, 2022).