by Barbara Lightner
I
Pirates have always captured
my imagination. Adventure
on the high seas, the swashbuckle
of life–
the successful underdog to
the wealth of the great
nations and the robber barons of industry,
taking booty, but most of all bringing defeat
to an arrogance of power and wealth:
a lawlessness in service to themselves,
and to the greater good.
Pirates are ever so much better
than Robin Hood, boring, boring,
unutterably boring, in his good, green wood.
The devilish, we all learn early, is ever so much
more interesting than the good.
Pirates, both the devil and the good.
It’s what imagination is made for.
II
So be it, the Pirates of Somali
raiding ships in their waters
to avenge two decades of tuna plunder
from their shores; and the detritus
of other nations dumped there;
along with heavy ransoms demanded
by men from a desperately poor country,
no sustenance for its people:
the devil along with the good
– must not be allowed,
the Secretary of State
of the United States says,
bestowing the pirates with
capitalism’s paradoxical, grim screed:
"They are nothing but criminals," she says
from her podium built
on her own country’s plunder and greed.
But the State Department is not enough.
The generals of the marauding great
must also get into the act:
two warships sent,
two helicopters, and more
of the great nation’s fleet soon on the way.
The offense, and the reason for this new
military surge against a tiny lifeboat on the great seas?
(It’s getting to be the fashionable thing,
to be sure, the surge.)
III
The Pirates of Somali mounted a ship
taking food and other relief to Africa’s shores,
but allowed it to continue on course
after taking its captain
into a small lifeboat;
a captain who, his friends say, is
"an outgoing daredevil"
one of the pirates’ own kind,
captive in that small lifeboat,
four pirates with him,
allowed to communicate by radio;
who jumped out of the lifeboat
to swim to a warship hovering near;
was brought back, is kept in the lifeboat unhurt.
IV
The greatest military power in the world
hovering, fit to kill;
unable to face down
four pirates and a captain
bobbing in a tiny lifeboat,
a 17,000 ton vessel overcome.
No pirates have dared the seas against
the United States of America
for two hundred years, someone says,
astounded.
It does the heart good, this standoff
with the pirates of Somali, guardians
of the seas, some devil, some good.
Barbara Lightner is a 70-year old shameless agitator, retired. After a career of community organizing and teaching at university, she turned her hand to poetry. As a bookshop owner, she sponsored poetry readings, and published chapbooks of local poets in Milwaukee, WI. Her poetry has appeared in the Table Rock Review and Poesia; as well as in Letters to the World, an anthology of women’s poetry.
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