Apparently yesterday fifteen years ago the US-led attack on Iraq began. Who was following? Abroad, only Tony Blair (though others may have been browbeaten into various levels of support). At home, it seemed as though practically everyone, or at least folks weren’t concerned and certainly not making a stink about it. Sean Penn spoke against it, because he wanted to know, Iraqi blood soon to be on his hands as an American citizen, what the face and faces of those about to be attacked looked like. I wrote about my efforts to stage a play in Chicago in opposition to the overwhelming trend of approbation for the military action, but failed (not to mention approaching one or two out-of-city theater companies), intending the essay as a prefatory introduction to that play if ever it gets published.
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​Before the bombs fell in a campaign intended to “shock and awe” its recipients, I had completed a book of poems about the business, not “washing my hands of it” (it impossible to do so) but voicing a dissident note; joined, after the bombs fell, by clusters of American citizens here and there who were persistent in showing up to events with “Stop the War” signs and making their views known. (It is not that there was no protest in advance of the campaign, but hardly of a density to make itself felt; and even those who blocked Lake Shore Drive that first evening did not make an impression against the ubiquitous propaganda.)

During the course of the war (if indeed that is the proper terminology for a military movement essentially in one direction), from time to time I posted poems online primarily as a means to vent outrage. These (or at least such of these as I managed to gather) were later assembled into a book of their own, the introduction to which is here. It goes without saying that after the apparent terrorist demolition of the World Trade Center and affiliated attacks, I had issued a book which argued for a peaceful response, not a bellicose one. However a deliberate effort by politicians riled up the populace, and it was that constant process that built up the wellspring of support for the campaign against Iraq, although Iraq had not been a party to those attacks.

​With the fifteenth anniversary come and now gone, I realize that has been the major event of my life, if not in all aspects equally certainly in the writing of poetry, which till not long ago had played a dominant part.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting I wrote this poem. It is the opening poem in my 2014 book The Rip of Gales. I have not “covered” subsequent (or other) “mass shooting events.” The subject is too hard to broach.

The plenitude of deaths, and especially deaths by violent means and deaths by murder, makes me say, with T.S. Eliot, “I should be glad of another death.”

My spirit continues to mourn Marielle Franco, who died by apparent assassination five days ago. I did not know her, but the continuing tributes pour in on social media. My sympathetic poem feels hardly adequate; but it would break me to revisit.

I just looked at the lines I wrote upon occasion of Daniel Pearl’s murder. He was but one year younger than me; there were some similarities in background, about which I wrote somewhere (mainly that we both had a journalism class in high school), and so I felt a kinship of sorts. The news cycle churns up other “events,” my life has continued, and I can’t understand why I have had some 15+ years beyond his allotment. There is no sense to it. (Beyond the obvious that poets tend to lead secluded, sedentary lives, comparatively speaking.)

Students who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting in Parkland, Florida, (along with other survivors and bereaved) have been agitating for changes in gun laws. We old cannot but look with admiration on the young, on these young.

Heavenly Father, please relieve my mind
Against this wickedness of humankind,
That will oppress, and shoring the oppression
Shy not from deeds abominable, aggression
Against those who protest and who fight back,
Nor shun no means in boldness of attack.

Teach me, O Lord, to extirpate the worm
That dwells within the heart, and delves long term,
As makes a man, in service of a cause,
Content to abrogate civilian laws,
Committing foul trespass against another
As ought to be his sister and his brother.

Assassination brings an end to things,
Yet let not hope be shorn its angel’s wings,
Even as victims may be martyrs made
When basic decency lies killed betrayed
By treacherous human action past the pale:
Though loved ones die, yet love can never fail.

Lord, Marielle Franco has been killed,
A voice that called for justice rudely stilled,
Yet let us be deterred not by this murder,
Loudly broadcasting wide that we have heard her,
And that “we are together” in this fray,
Even in such words as we heard her say.

The ancient sin, as though a tapeworm in
The body politic, with us has been
Even since slaves were brought across the seas
To give their lives and labor—a disease
From plunderous days, and even days before
When men sought to acquire ill gains by war.

As Marielle Franco now ascends
In spirit to eternity, her friends
And family bereaved, must wet the earth
With salty tears of which there is no dearth,
And carry her to heaven on their sighs
Such as ensue when a good person dies.

We who survive, must dedicate ourselves
To extirpating the vile worm that delves
Like an iniquity that cankers love,
And say, of murder we have had enough,
Adding, in no small voice, that at love’s core
We treasure those same things that she stood for.

All the oppression man has done to man
We must revoke, renouncing as we can,
Even denouncing the atrocious means
(As justice dies in sanguinary scenes)
Of violently exploiting man or beast— 
Even the greatest of us is the least.

She goes, and we retain in memory
An inspiration, how to live as free
And strenuously give voice to what is right
Even though we be martyred in the night
Like Marielle Franco, now deceased,
In legacy of her strong faith increased.