A PRAYER FROM THE GROUND

A PRAYER  FROM THE GROUND 

(Remembering 9/11, New York, September 11, 2011)

Death gets more credit/ than it deserves. / It is we who, wherever/ the bomb lands, draw/a bull’s-eye. /…& while predators rest, / to stretch bold as shadows/toward whatever they/or the wind happen/to have dropped. ---From “Death Angels” by Dave Bonta, Via Negativa, 09-10-11

After many a summer dies the swan.

That is not easy to forget as a title

or a even as a farewell line, its gentle

glide on the mouth making it tender. 

Every death should all be soft and kind,

as we were made to degrade gracefully.

Unsporting to slaughter the innocent

as ransoms of avenging angels, angry 

for Allah and their oil wells, deranged

saints suckled in a jihad’s bitter taste.

Tremulous echoes of names called out

from the hollowed depths of a hallowed 

Ground Zero is pungent prayer enough

to remember quartered limbs, shattered

lives that cannot be buried with the dead

though dead they have always remained 

through these angry years of carnage

by vengeful sons bound to exact pounds

of flesh out of the putrid carrions littered

still in abandoned desert meccas. Gobi 

of all gobis, these are even colder grounds

where no fountains flow, nor flowers grow.

These are golgothas not far from the old

hill of skulls that cried for forgiveness 

but heirs to the crusade cannot, will not

give, though muezzins sing themselves

hoarse at their minarets for peace. Army

chaplains still stay bivouacked to pray 

for our boys to win back the killing fields

from those who dared bring a scoundrel

of hell into the heart of freedom land

with a mission to spit on money lenders. 

From those smoothened granite surfaces

bearing the perished names cut to shine

on lambent ground, dare we ask if death

has truly lost its sting? Will the Tree die, too? 

---Albert B. Casuga

09-11-11

Please click on the image to zoom in on the text.

Please click on the scanned text to zoom in. This is how I would have wanted my previously posted poem, "An Unhealing Wound" (09-09-11) to appear on the page. Blog, however, cannot accommodate the layout. Its ideographic aspiration might have concretized the experience of those crumbling twin towers in terms of the columns of verse. Poetry is not only a painting with words, it can always --- like the Chinese and Japanese ideographs --- define a picture for the limned word in these page layouts.