This is the last dance.” —Robert Bly, “Unrest”
I wake to the harshest
of dreams. I make a poster
one weekend—photo of a little
girl from Gaza, hungry. Afraid.
Arms reaching out, a begging,
pleading moment—so much
agony on that little face.
I write a caption:
"Please don’t kill me."
I show this to people, and they
say you can't share this:
it's too terrible, too severe.
So it sits on my desk.
Someone wants me to write
about my earlier days,
But do they really matter?
I try, humoring them, but get
nowhere. Those days seem
puny. Even childhood, formative,
but so far away, lost to thunder
and the blasts of artillery
in another land. Someone says
there is goodness yet. They point
to flowers in a garden
down the street. They smell nice,
but, for me, it doesn't last. A man holds
a woman's hand down at the
beach, but I don’t sit with them.
In Ellay, the masks come
as the faces of hatred serving
power, power serving hatred.
The same. I come from
the same farmland as Robert
Bly, forty years later. The snow
blows across fields, the corn
groans to be born.
But the prairie is no barrier
to speaking truth about evil,
no hindrance to fulminating
about the big wrongdoing.
I wake from a new dream
alive with anger and clarity:
these words must be said.
I want the men in masks
to lift them from their faces,
join the masses, the evil
to be buried at the point
of a pen. Then, I will sit.
