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| A 2008 cartoon by Simon Farr (The Guardian) |
Seventy-five years ago,
in a dive on Fifty-Second Street,
on the day Hitler's Panzers rolled into Poland
W.H. Auden lamented the end of
"a low and dishonest decade,"
with "waves of anger and fear"
rolling over the earth's "darkened lands."
And here, in the middle of another low and dishonest decade,
I sit at my computer desk in St. Louis, Missouri,
sniffing the same "unmentionable odour of death"
as Auden did, this time rising from the sandy dunes
of Iraq and the glutted bloodlands of Ukraine.
I endure the same "negation and despair,"
as blood flows instead of milk and honey
promised us by psychopathic gods we worship.
George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO and contributes to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News.