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Poetry || SubmissionsGutted WallsBy Janet I. Buck In Bethlehem, the sign of the cross is surrounded by smoke. Streets are empty melon rinds. Tanks roll their pockmarks over clay and no one dares to break the curfew with a smile or walk the dust cemented in a coming grave. Sacred hymns these wretched hours in hissings made of rifle fire. I know three poets in this jail -- no psalms in palms but grief itself. Standing, Helen Keller style, deaf and blind beneath a church's balding dome, passion in an organ’s rumble, tactile barbs from a knotty fence they didn’t build, they didn't wire, but feel just like dripping blood. Over here -- a Christmas carol seems lamely joyous, helpless in its practiced score. Licking wounds with more red terror does nothing to remove the stain. Guns reduce a child's eyes to cherry pits that never witness redder fruit. Vile tantrums, ancient grudges take their tolls, leave the earth a tortoise shell where heads are hiding from the air. Photos of a gutted wall in gray/brown stone to symbolize religion's mule in black and white that hauls no peaceful olive branch. All These Scissored Christmas Carols My poet friends in Israel have traded quills for nails to hammer-lock their doors. Pantries stock themselves for death. Their earthquakes rumble cyber-space. In cherub hours, I saw the word "Jerusalem" in Christmas carols -- in letters under organ scores. Considered straw a crib of music, sanguine blessings full of prayers in full unmuted dignity. I was young, but pedals seemed to blare a satin purpose then. Religion’s robe, its velvet purple amythest, was not the wool that brewed another batch of blood. The news is stacking skeletons like pencils in a cardboard box. Every footstep on a street could carry cardamom demise. Western skies seem opals that I didn't earn -- so babyish in arrant dream while someone's choosing teenage girls to spread the map of hate like quilts. Politics of plastic horses pistoning while canvas tents turn black with smoke. Morale is vaguer camouflage than gray and green on manger wood. Body counts keep climbing up, keep climbing up the stairs of why. War's bubble grows until it pops. Terror never seems to shrink; it just explodes in plums against a concrete wall. The more I read, I wish for blind. ***For Elisha Porat, Moshe Benarroch, and Karen Alkalay-Gut More from Janet I. Buck More poetry by Janet I. Buck at Ariga. To Janet's web site Today's Situation
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