Issue/Publication:

Poem

September 21, 2001

Flags

Flags are everywhere.

Tied to cars, stitched to clothes, strapped

to twisted girders, fanning the air

where silver needles have pierced

the ribs of my city, tossing hope

to the teeth of gravity, cinching

the collar on a world straining to breathe.

Men are lifting broken children from stones

in Beirut. A flop-eared mutt worries

a human foot in Bosnia. Skulls

peek through lianas in Guatemala,

while a fireman breathes

into the mouth of an infant in Oklahoma.

The cookies of mothers, pomengranites, musky marriage sheets,

pistachios and birthday cakes, Jello

drenched in oil and iron slag .Everywhere,

electrons serve only their own will,

heavy metals float as ash. Gaps

in every skyline. Every where, flags

take wing in the heart

of people, flutter in the corner of my tv

while a man, lips slick with marrow,

barks at me. The prep-school boys are loose

again. The palm-frond bars stocking up on brewskis,

for the dead-drop spy-boys

Tegucicalpa, El Mozote and Panama,.

off to Baghdad, Kabul, and Peshawar—the

syllables of their itinerary clot the tongue.

The Class of ’55 is lonesome once again

for bottle-neck flies. Soot-stained

snapshots, an upturned chair,

---everywhere people weeping and afraid,

waving flags, plotting check and mate,

as if one smooth move might rid the world

of shadows. They are burying

Jews in Tel Aviv, lofting martyrs

in Ramallah, cursing the mourners in New York.

Everywhere tattered space

where couples sauntered

or warmed their hands with chestnuts.

Each banner is a thousand deaths somewhere

else, each flag a sword, or swooning plane.

Each snapping banner taps

a riddle in code: How can the heart of a people

be opened by a killer? Closed by a leader? Numbed

to suffering as it weeps? The dead

in Chile are poems, in Nicaragua palms and vines.

The dead in Yugoslavia are stacked in Brussels,

in Baghdad are irradiated dirt.

In New York drift onto sills

and dashboards where the glass vaporized,

dancing in freshets of air that hiss like whispers,

startling those holding their breaths, alert

for the faintest of cries from the rubble.

And the man with the soft brown eyes

in the lavender shadows of poppies,

negotiates with the angel of Death

the requisite number of souls to be

stitched to a flag for Allah.