From “Iraq 1991: Dress Rehearsal for Imperial Demise”, section in Avatar on the Borderlands, unpublished manuscript by Pina Piccolo. The poems “Desert Sand” and “Sindbad” were published in 1991 in Poetry USA, a print journal edited by Jack Foley.
Desert Sand
Fine, fine desert sand
blowing at will, knowing no master
No rational route
in the highways of sky and land.
Daughter of mountains
that fell and decayed
overwhelmed by sea and time
you learned to survive
covering and uncovering
thousands of years
minarets and Bedouins’ tents
the bones of camels and the bones of men.
Fine, unruly and unpredictable,
Insidious, halting precision machines
A threat to established boundaries
A scourge to stability
Praise be to the grain of sand
that shifts and changes,
and refuses to be anchored.
Desert Drum
Beat the drum,
great grandsons of Chief Seattle,
let your ancestors mourn
fresh victims of the great grandsons
of cowboys, of slaves, of field hands.
Let your lament envelop them
like a mother’s blanket,
let it be a lullaby
of rage for lives that became twisted.
Beat the drum,
great granddaughters of warriors and wise women,
let your voice shriek out
a cry of denunciation,
let it sting like disinfectant,
let it destroy the germs of domination.
(1991)
Sindbad
Sindbad, won’t you tell us
A story of silence,
Of ancient cities living underground,
Like moles scared to be blinded
By unforgiving lights.
Tell us,
Sailor of olden times,
About a place with barely a stretch of sea,
Ringed by ships spewing fire.
Tell us what the children did
In the thousand and one nights of horror,
When the siren went off?
Did they follow the seductress’ song
To the womb of the earth,
Or were their tender limbs
Scattered in the wind
By incandescent droppings
Of steel birds?
Sindbad, have you lost your tongue?
We need you, ancient adventurer,
For the chess players of power
Conjure false images
To atrophy the heart,
Twist words out of meaning
To plug up the brain.
Please spin us a tale,
Where shame can glow redder than hot coals
And sorrow can flow more bitter than medicine.
Schwarzkopf Meets Gilgamesh
Das General Blackhead
strayed for a moment
from his fawning court of admirers,
seeking a moment of quiet
under the tranquil fronds of the Hilton garden.
All of a sudden there appeared
a man of great height
(most unusual for an Arab, thought he).
He approached, with a fierce countenance,
in ancient robes:
“I have come – said the stranger –
for thou hadst summoned me
for high noon,
I beseech thee
to cross through this door,
in the middle of the forest,
and then we shall see
who is the winner?”
Storming Norman stood there,
not quite knowing what to do,
trying to remember
what the US policy was about doors.
Should they be kept open
or slammed? What about strange ones
coming out of nowhere, should one
cross their threshold if you couldn’t see
what lay behind them?
Pondering he stood there
wishing he had taken some precautions.
But the merciless giant urged on,
he had to show he was a man
So he crossed.
How did it feel to fall
down the centuries
like clouds,
lifted by the wind
of arrogance,
then pushed down by the lead
of blows?
How did it feel to see
suddenly all Empires
rise and fall,
all medals rust and wither?
Limbs scattered and brains blown
hatred and guts spilled?
The threads of uniforms
barely hanging, heavy armor molten
in the oven of time?
General Schwarzkopf,
gently lifted off the ground by an aid,
embarrassedly murmured:
“One martini too many”
but thereafter showed some reluctance
at crossing doors.
Gilgamesh sat there under the fig tree
waiting disconsolate
like he had for millennia
for his door to catch
a general wearing no blinders.
Prickly Gifts
A friend phoned
because he didn’t want to be
alone with his bitterness.
The telephone wire
delivered me a gift of prickly pears.
The skin tough and spiny,
but inside filled with
pulp and seed
promising cactus
that could grow on arid land
defying.
Gonna Cry Me a River
The parched land,
dry and brittle as bone,
made wicked by the sight
of armed men
deafened by the sounds
of bombs, missiles, and tanks
Blinded by the smoke of fires
nauseated by the stench of death
refused to put on blossoms.
She wrapped herself in a black veil
walked barefoot
and began to wail
screaming her sorrow
to the winds of the universe.
Her tears washed the dust
for 40 days and 40 nights
A newborn river flowed
not of forgetting,
but of eternal remembrance.
The Tigris and the Euphrates
now have a third brother
The river of Shame,
of blood spilt in vain
on the altar of a 21 century Baal.
Cover image: Dick Marconi. mixed media, enamel, resin on wood panel