March 19, 2008: On the Fifth Anniversary of the Illegal and Immoral Occupation of Iraq

By way of editorial commentary: As the great Yogi Berra once quipped, “It’s deja vu all over again.” As the drum beats for war in the Middle East once again reverberate loudly to catch the attention of the American Sheeple, I thought of this poem I wrote on the date of the 5-year anniversary of the Iraq War, which should have been called “Operation Enduring Bullshit” (I’m all about truth in advertising). This process is so formulaic, surely I can’t be the only person seeing the template of (a) a democratically elected president, once he’s fallen out of usefulness/favor with the U.S., gets demonized as a “dictator” (e.g., Hussein, Mubarak, Gaddafi, and now al-Assad); (b) the U.S. covertly funds destabilizing agents, first praised by the media as stalwart “rebels” against an oppressive “regime” (think “Star Wars,” folks) to depose said “dictator”; (c) the “rebels” armed and trained by the U.S. turn out to be terrorists; (d) “blowback” on a major scale erupts; (e) a series of highly publicized atrocities elicit commentary from the POTUS on inevitable military action; (e) the shareholders of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, et al, applaud fervently. To quote the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes.”

Well, as a Pagan priestess who loves to wear her critical thinking cap and remind people, even through her bumper stickers, that “YOU CAN’T KILL FOR PEACE,” I want to offer my poem “On the Fifth Anniversary of the Illegal and Immoral Occupation of Iraq” in the hopes of blockading the march to war. Salaam.

March 19, 2008

I’m having a Sylvia Plath evening

of arduous domesticity, where poetry

leers between loads of laundry,

bidding me to take up the pen

while Tide Pure Essentials with Baking Soda™

valiantly tries to scrub the menstrual blood

from my newly stained underwear

I’m not the only creature bleeding in the world today

Is blood spilt in the desert easier to sweep away?

From Basra to Baghdad,

Tikrit to biblical Nineveh, the numbers are staggering:

One point two million dead

Four million refugees

Displaced from their homes

Displaced form their civilization,

Which, I’ll have you know,

was the most advanced secular nation

in the entire Arab world

Oh Inanna

You do not go unaccompanied into the

Underworld

Millions have been forced to endure

Your shame and torture and have

found themselves

dangling

from meathooks

 

The fig leaves of launching a war to spread “democracy”

and halt the proliferation of WMDs

that never existed in the first place

were blown off the rampaging,

carcinogenic juggernaut of the

body politic long ago,

exposing the rotten phallus of

imperialist hegemony and the

flaccid kow-towing towards Israel

for what it is

this clap-laden dick likes to

make unilateral, international law-defying wars of aggression

against non-threatening nations

A schoolyard bully writ large

Serbia in 1999

Afghanistan in 2001

Those were test cases

The springboards

from which to ejaculate so many “smart” bombs

(dicks in macrocosmic form)

with their precisely guided annihilation

of civilian infrastructure targets:

Hospitals, homes, bridges, marketplaces, schools, places of worship

They were wiped out in Belgrade,

Novi Sad,

Niš,

Užice, and

Kosovo Mitrovica—courtesy of

my taxpayer dollars—and they

were wiped out among the Sunni, Shia, and Kurds in Iraq, too,

All the better to

“liberate” them

Naturally!

It’s okay to spread democracy with bombs

comprised of depleted uranium

when the intended targets

are non-Westerners standing in

Washington’s way

Let the demonization begin

Rag heads

Camel jockeys

Sand niggers

Less than human

so their accumulated corpses don’t count

their undignified deaths in the desert

can be swept away in plain sight

American Idle is too preoccupied

with the bread and circuses

pandered by a corrupt, consumerist media to care

 

I know damn well

that Mssrs. Bush and Cheney

as well as Senators McCain and Clinton

won’t be kept awake in horror

as I am tonight

by the photograph of a dead Iraqi infant

A baby girl

heaped upon a pile of corpses in

the back of a truck

Her eyes were jet-black slits

that possessed a full awareness of

the grievous wrongs inflicted upon

her people

Her tiny mouth was slightly parted

as if she were emitting a cry

Infant indignation

 

A nation of ghosts

 

That’s what we are

 

That’s all we’re capable of creating

• Afghanistan
• American Idle
• death
• feminism
• ghosts
• Inanna
• Iraq
• moral outrage
• Poetry
• politics
• Serbia
• Sylvia Plath
• war
• witnessing