Wednesday, February 14, 2007

WAR GATE (a priori)

by Carol Elizabeth Owens

“Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?
But that's exactly what our government did.”
— Rep. Henry Waxman during a hearing reviewing possible waste,
fraud and abuse of funds in Iraq. Quoted by CNN.com Feb. 7, 2007.


news flash
the mint’s been taxed
by tons and we’re taken
in a two-fold manner— conflict
kills and crisp dollar bills
are found missing
this short

green bomb
has a long fuse
it’s not an improvised
device— the deployment carries
concealed costs. so follow
those flows of fast
funding

money
cools easily
when hidden in danger
zones because we’re swiftly spent there
no one can look around
for that crackling
contract

defense
teams up with oil
for one of the hottest
new opportunities today
terrorism’s clever
and greed is hard
to fight


Carol Elizabeth Owens is an attorney and counselor-at-law in Western New York (by way of Long Island and New York City). She enjoys technical and creative writing. Her poetry has been published in several print and virtual publications. Ms. Owens loves the ways in which words work when poetry allows them to come out and play. The poem "war gate (a priori) " is written in a form called eintou (which is West African for "pearl," as in "pearls of wisdom").