Two Poems

Atlanta


there are chimneys
like exclamations
of existence
as if to claim that
Sherman
had never come.

So I sit with a
cotton ball
being spun in my hands,
the seeds like
hail
as they
are robbed of their homes
and rendered desolate.

Still there are trees
bearing the scars
of their ferric
bowties,
steel ablaze
in the time of war.

and on the floor
are jars of clay
that protect
bourbon,
that close eyes
with a solemn
X X,
that provide
respite
from the summer heat.

If there were
instead
children huddled
inside of corners,
or girls of fifteen
condemned to loosened
corsets
and the brutal touch
of a stranger
clad in blue,

then those that
clap their hands
to call the attention
of the dead
would understand
the savage grace
of bricks
crumbling in flame

and know why
there are those that
cannot bear to
look at the land
unless they weep.



#2 Dzerzhinsky

Beria’s office
once was blocked
by a heavy armoire.

The lair of those
Lords
of
the sword and shield
has
at long last
with
the help of blood
made fertile
the soil
of that barren land.

In Rome
the parapets soar.
Miters rest
with considerable élan.
The shoes of the pontiff
are dyed a deep crimson.
It is a great
fortunate
occurrence.
It prevents
his environs
from causing stains.

A Poem I (mostly) stole from someone else

Grape tomatoes are not extremely pricey
but I have never had one.

I am told that something in them
gives the illusion of gently lapping
at a rubber tree with a liquid core,
a latex bomb with water inside,
always about to burst.

In those moments no taste emerges
except that sugared savor of expectation and tension,
like the first time of reaching for a hand to hold
or the icy rush of saying goodbye and then
reaching for the door:
that escape from solitude
or else its wintry pole.

A wise person, I am told,
will sometimes nearly
bite
into
a grape tomato
only to place it back in its carton
at the last second.

Strawberries and
cherry tomatoes
also do not cost very much.
They too come in little cartons.
I suppose they do much
of the same kind of thing,
although they may be less expensive.

On Home Schooling and the Offering of Political Asylum

The Romeike family was recently extended political asylum by the United States government. The New York Times reports: “In a harshly worded decision, the judge, Lawrence O. Burman, denounced the German policy, calling it “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans,” and expressed shock at the heavy fines and other penalties the government has levied…”

What policy could raise such ire? What could be so horribly repellent to everything embodied in our country and our people? The end result of the sad truth of the German society will scandalize the weak of spirit. In Germany, it’s illegal for you to not put your children in school. Home schooling is not only looked at as a means to create socially challenged individuals, but is even further punished by means of fines and even the threat of having one’s children taken away. Luckily, this monstrous injustice has been set to rights.

Instructive to the political groups of the day are certain observations: from 2005-2007, the U.S. government extended political asylum to about 40,000 individuals per year. Taking a low estimate of the casualties inflicted by the state-sponsored violence in Darfur, 300,000, which would only count death and not the widespread rape and many other nightmares of everyday life in the Sudan, from 2003 (the “start” of the current phase of the conflict) to today you end up with ~50,000 people every year who are dying because of the ethnic group that they are in: more than the whole of asylum spots offered for the whole year.

Clearly, something is missing. Happily, it has been cleared up for us. Mass murder and pandemic rape are not enough to summon the fury of a Southern judge: home schooling appears to be.
The Third World needs to swiftly move to ban home schooling in all portions of their country. That the bans should be enforced with brutality and callousness to human life goes without saying: it will in any case largely be par for the course. Perhaps it would further move judges in asylum cases to reflect that a country, that didn’t even provide education services would criminalize and marginalize people for DARING to education their own children in the ways that they saw it, surely constituted a clear and present threat (especially with current violence, the world is after all an unsavory place) to life, liberty, and human rights.

Certain rights must be held to be sacrosanct, and people coming from lands writ in the tongue of a nightmare will benefit from the proposals to ban home schooling in impressive and quantifiable ways: a child with kwashiorkor whose parents just wanted to teach morality properly will be embraced by a country that values its education. A woman who has been raped many times, living in an area where gathering firewood is a high risk activity, will finally have the security to shake off the shackles of her government and teach her children the history of Christianity in Africa, a subject not even offered in area schools.

Children, after all, are the world’s most precious resource. The Esteemed Judge’s acknowledgement of this is merely the first step towards ensuring that all children, be they healthy and well-fed or in the throes of vitamin deficiency and infectious disease, have the things that we as Americans most value.

Just as this European, evangelical Christian family now have earned a place in this last bastion of freedom and recognition of human rights: through blind justice.