Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Tuesday poem #558 : Ron Silliman : THIRD FROM THE SUN

 

 

The hang glider sails out

over the concert goers

over the border

bringing death

 

Portrait of a family

three smoldering husks

in a burned-out car

their heads thrown back mouths open in

a perpetual scream

 

No Munch, no Goya

No Icarus falling

into Breughel’s sea

Not even Pinochet’s 

airforce dropping prisoners

high over the 

Pacific Skin pealing

from the backs of

Hiroshima’s dead

 

I can shut my eyes

but I cannot unsee

the horrors before me

before you before us

 

I had thought this was behind us

but I was wrong Men I have met

ordered the death of Lumumba

calmly as you order tea

the spectacle of the bullet

in Bin Laden’s brain

 

lacking only popcorn

in that theater at

the White House

 

So now a Secret

Service agent concedes

he found the second bullet

there was a second bullet

Oswald could never

have acted alone

 

Kennedy stares

up from the gurney

into a future

he'll never see we’ll

never see our 

children’s children

will suffer unspeakably

 

The diplomat leaving the

consulate carrying

Khashoggi in a suitcase

parts is parts permits

a negotiation nobody much wants

five years hence, a deal

somebody else hopes to stop

hence the graceful silent

mechanical birds in the cloudless

air you cannot breathe

if you are burning alive

your flesh curdling crisping

the smell of your eyebrows

your hair your hands 

 

Permit me to kiss you

on your burned-out lips

I can’t even tell your gender

it burns away as with dreams

loves, memories, unfinished

business that would still

make you anxious if only

you could remember

what it was to live on this planet

 

 

 

 

 

Ron Silliman [image credit: Didi Menendez] recently moved to Springfield, Pennsylvania after 28 years on the Main Line. He teaches at Penn. With Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander and Jeffrey Jullich, he co-edited David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems, just published by Nightboat Books.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

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