CB Follett
(USA)
ARMS
After American tanks buried alive The Pentagon said yesterday that a « gap in the laws
thousands of Iraqi soldiers, one witness governing warfare made it legally permissible during
cried, And there were arms and things the gulf war for U.S. tanks to bury alive thousands of
still sticking up everywhere. Iraqi troops in their trenches…”
(AP News) (AP News two weeks later)
Planted in native soil,
their haphazard stalks reach up
across raw sky, as the blade
advances, caressing
the soil over them,
filling their mouths with dirt.
Who could plow along such trenches,
where soldiers — fierce, timid, scared —
wish the years of war were over,
yearn to be home with children,
hot food, and the warm breasts of women?
Coming down the sands is their death,
with a bull-blade and traction treads
driven by an unseen boy,
a boy, who hopes no one will know
there were soldiers who cowered
in trenches when he lowered his plow,
that men threw up their hands
against the crushing – their conversion
into land.
Where does he look, as men drop
all pretense of bravery; lost
before they can breathe back in,
and arms poke from the ground, a new forest
of leafless barbs stuck in the earth,
into the hearts of young soldiers
from the U.S. of A: drawing not blood
but corrosion.
Believe me, young soldiers, believe me,
you will never forget it – those arms –
those sticks of men you sowed in the desert.
DEMARCATION
There’s a line in every city where streets
turn mean once you’ve crossed it,
where the air pulls tighter and people
carry an edge with their careful eyes,
where you adjust from a lope
to a determined stride that says
Don’t mess with me.
You’ll know when you reach it,
the dividing of a city, wide as a river,
narrow as a white line down the center,
and when you cross it, the things
you wouldn’t notice behind
now seem to color the places ahead,
and the people coming toward you
are no longer your neighbors.
They are loosely held together; circumstances
have nudged them left of center. They are
walking toward the line you just crossed
but they won’t – no more comfortable with comfort
than you are with dis-comfort. And though
there are things you are after, places you
will go in this other country, you don’t know
the idioms spoken here. You are traveling
on a foreign passport in your home streets
where people you might have grown up with
have gone to ground on the other side of a line.
Every city has one and when you come to it,
you must will yourself to cross.
My Dear,
Every day I look at the news and see
your country torn open. I see you
in what’s left of your house, your children
hollow-eyed around you, uncovered
against the cold. I see lines at the food stalls
that any moment may explode. I see
those few coins tied in the corner of your
kerchief and wonder when and how
you will get more. I see your eyes
hungry and suspicious. The dirt
on your arms means there is no water today.
If I knew your name, if you had an address
I would send you warm clothes. I would
send you peaches; paper and pencils
for the children. But I see only soldiers
with guns and thick boots. I see the corners
where snipers hide. I see your face and wish
I could hold you, lift you from the fallen
stones, take you where beds are covered
with clean sheets. Where the noises
in the nights are owls, not gunshots.
If I could I would build you a road
out of town, with a cart and donkey to
carry the children. You could take your
last pot and your grandmother’s quilt.
If I could I would cleanse you
of the splatters of fear, give your children
books and hope. If I could, I would plant
you a garden, knit your sons sweaters,
brush your daughters’ hair free of tangles.
Rain would come down again into your
barrels, candles would never burn out.
Somewhere together we would find your
husband, bring him, safe and strong, back to you.
The soldiers who shoot and rape would instead
rebuild your walls. We’d make a roof again.
I would learn your songs and we
would sing. The children would sing.
The rivers would run clean and horses
would again come down to drink.
The Jackdaws Come at Noon
Swoop over our heads threatening
our skin, our skulls, as they used
to sweep over the corpses of our fathers
and brothers; who could not get away;
who were seized from our houses,
dragged into the streets, lined up
in front of our windows and shot.
Fathers,
who worked the fields, or repaired
the water pumps; our young sons
and brothers grown an inch
too tall, barely a darkening
on their chins; their faces
innocent but their eyes old,
so old – and now
we are a village of women. The corpses
are bones under the dirt and the crows
flap black and uncivil to protect
their own young.
When I was a child,
my grandfather would put a piece of tape
on the nail of his right pointer, another
on the nail of his left, and recite some little
silliness about crows: ‘Fly away jack. Fly away
jill. Come back jack, Come back jill”
The farmers shot
the crows in the field. They had no corn
to share and no clothes to spare for
Straw Toms to prop up in the rapeseed
and they didn’t scare the crows, not for long.
And now we are
our own farmers, tiny plots of vegetables
in houses we can’t maintain against rain
and the jacks build their nests in our
stunted trees or our chimneys, and treat us
as the poor relations.
Some men have come
back from the fighting, and there are now
small boys playing jacks, hopping over rocks.
A threadbare woman has started a school
in the old barn and some of the children
go when they can, when they are not sick,
or too hungry to sleep.
Words to the Mother Whose Son Killed My Son
He’s just as dead,
killed by your son, or someone else;
muddy where they dragged him
through the jungle, bruised
when they tossed him over the compound wall
while blood was still doing its work,
rushing to protect, cushion, heal
a boy already dead
ready to stiffen and cool.
It could as easily been your son, chilling
in moist soil, awaiting the carrion beetles:
left behind by my son
as he high-fived his buddies.
The truth is, I would have killed
your son that day to save mine.
We who once sat grateful for no news;
we did not choose this for our sons.
I have no need of your country,
where my son trespassed under orders
from shoulders with bars and oak leaves.
Your country endlessly trying to edge free
from invaders; each more technocratic,
with improved death,
with the sear of napalm
that kills people as well as land.
We were no match for your sons
defending their crops, their villages.
They knew each hill and sightline,
each beetle and snake;
were willing to lie among them, dig
into them to quiet and wait.
My son, used to sidewalks
and one apple tree in spring,
was good on his feet, quick of eye,
but not acclimated to yellow light
flicking through thick forests,
where vines move in heat waves
languid as the enemy.
His eyes blurred from straining to see
what was leaf
and what was not.
I mourn for my son,
for his quick laugh,
his perfect spiral pass,
delicate touch with fly and reel,
and his big size twelve feet.
My son is lost forever,
and in ways perhaps more powerful
and corroding, you have also
lost yours.
Falling Into Rank
No one knows how they started
or why, like a river of slurry
picks up silt along the route
thickening the flow.
An endless millipede of Sudanese boys
straggles over ridges, down gullies,
along the dust path before them.
They walk because others are walking.
All are hungry, some
want education. Others
out in the dry cattle fields watched
as troops killed entire villages.
When a file of boys crested the rise,
they dropped their staffs and walked.
If one of us falls, we dig a grave,
bury him by the roadside;
we don’t even know him – only
that he was a piece of us we leave here
to mark our passing through.
Their skins are the color of dust,
a parched color.
Boys rise up
from their villages, their mothers,
and fall into rank beside others
they’ve never seen before.
They walk to be part of something,
to be going toward something
even if what and where have no answers.
(Boys from Sudan, some as young as 4, walked for six years and over 1000 miles, riss-crossing several countries. Thousands died of starvation, sickness, and gunfire. Others were mauled by lions or drowned in rivers they couldn’t swim. 11,000 of them made it to Kenya.)
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CB Follett is an artist and the author of 9 books of poems, the most recent Of Gravity and Tides (2013), and several chapbooks, most recent is Wind Rose (2014). At the Turning of the Light won the 2001 National Poetry Book Award. She is Editor/Publisher and general dogsbody of Arctos Press, was publisher and co-editor (with Susan Terris) of RUNES, a Review of Poetry (2001-2008). Follett has numerous nominations for Pushcart Prizes for individual poems, as well as eight nominations as a individual poet; a Marin Arts Council Grant for Poetry; awards and honors and been widely published both nationally and internationally. Follett was Poet Laureate of Marin County, CA, USA. (2010-2013).
With prize winning photographer-activist, Ginna Fleming, she has published DUET: A Conversation of Words and Images (2014), photographs and poems relating to each other on the pages.