week, time to
abstain, except for allowing
thoughts and memories
of spasms, teeth, and hair, *
instant coffee, blood,
and instant replies
to leak
onto my desk.
True, terror is
one mob,
one group,
one country,
but of the soul,
the great realm
equipped
with emotions, gas
fixtures, and wheels
within wheels.
OK, Father, **
you’re first.
when you witnessed
your own
chosen people
rape
the earth in Russia, ***
force
the dead to dig
their grave,
get undressed,
bend
at the edge of the pit,
on top of those already
gone?
When you saw
arms sticking out,
waving,
what did you do,
Father?
I know.
impressed
my youth with your
shame (or so I thought),
until, more than 33
years later, you went
on the air
and told the children
of the survivors
that “God does not hear
the prayer of a Jew.” ****
Father.
And you, Mother,
what did you do,
apart from calling
politics a dirty game
and raising me and
Calley, *****
your youngest son?
guns for Christmas?
Why did you praise
his manhood
when he shot
birds?
And why did you stay silent
throughout all wars?
today Calley
masturbates
every night,
dreaming
of peasant girls
in Vietnam, vaginas
filled
with grenades.
throwaway can,
he drowns
the noise of past
explosions
inside enemy
women
with fresh loads
of sperm and foam.
your silence
like bad breath.
or I, same thing:
The cursed-blessed one
who has to share
his bed with God
fearing racists,
angels of xenophobia;
the white
black
amongst tenured
academics, weathered
cowboys whose boots
walk over women and
the last few imprints
of a pair
of moccasins.
and open wounds,
why don’t I
shut up,
instead of wrapping
my feeble protests
in mini-speeches, ******
delivered regularly
every Monday night
between 5:30 and 6:45,
collecting good points
like a Sunday
school kid?
stay, my stomach
filled
with cheap hamburgers,
instant coffee and
instant two minute
replies, my mind
blank
when my friends
stand straight,
when they—in unison
and unashamed,
pledges of patriotism
over a piece
of stained cloth?
isn’t good enough;
vomiting
poems won’t persuade.
Instead, instead
of acting
victim and voyeur,
stop playing
savage,
servile games;
learn to control
the terror of the soul;
behind the wheels
within wheels;
and don’t faint
when you are hit
by the stench
of silence.
before you cut
colleagues, brothers,
others,
look into the glass
of judgment:
reflect.
week, time to abstain,
except for allowing
thoughts and memories
of spasms, teeth, and hair,
instant coffee, blood
and instant replies
onto my desk.
** My father, a German journalist, witnessed a mass execution in Russia in the winter of 1943-44, an event so horrible that he lost his belief in the Fuehrer, even his will to live and, as everything he wrote had to go through a censor, he wrote to my mother, “Read more than my letters. Read that which I did not write. Read that which could shatter my heart.” This quote became the opening of Metronome Ticking, a Holocaust docudrama.
*** Countless Poles from the military and the intelligentsia got mass murdered by Stalin’s Russian troops in the Katyn massacre with over 20,000 victims. My father, a young war correspondent, witnessed a similar mass execution in Russia. My mother never told me who the victims were, most likely Jews, Romani, Russians, and others considered Untermenschen (sub-humans) by the Nazis.
**** Bailey Smith, Southern Baptist Convention President, Aug. 22, 1980.
***** William Calley, former United States Army officer, found guilty of murdering 22 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War.
****** Member of the Toastmasters International club at Oklahoma State University, 1980-81.
Spring 1981, Updated October 25, 2017
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