This time the Editor's choice
is Marilyn Hacker from New York. Her two poems
are given in the Editor's choice: 1. Ghazal- Dar
al Harb and 2. Morning News. The poems prove how
firm the poet's love for her country is and how
firmly she hates war. This is patriotism in its
true spirit. Every patriot has to learn this Great
Spirit from Marilyn. She laments for her country
as well for all peoples of the world. It is painful
to be a patriot, but it is also proud to be a
patriot.
Editor.
GHAZAL: Dar al-Harb for Fady Joudah and Wafa'a Zeinal'abidin
but millions have reason to fear and hate my country.
I might wish to write, like Virginia: as a woman,
I have none,
but women and men are crushed beneath its weight:
my country.
As English is my only mother tongue,
it’s in English I must excoriate my country.
The good ideas of Marx or Benjamin Franklin
do not excuse the gulags, or vindicate my country.
Who trained the interrogators, bought the bulldozers?
-- the paper trails all indicate my country.
It used to be enough to cross an ocean
and view, as a bemused expatriate, my country.
The June blue sky, the river’s inviting
meanders:
then a letter, a headline make me contemplate
my country.
Is my only choice the stupid lies of empire
or the sophistry of apartheid: my country?
Walter Benjamin died in despair of a visa
permitting him to integrate my country.
Exiles, at least, have clarity of purpose:
can say my town, my mother and my fate, my country.
There used to be a face that looked like home,
my interlocutor or my mate, my country
.
Plan your resistance, friends, I’ll join
you in the street,
but watch your backs: don’t underestimate
my country.
Where will justice and peace get the forged passports
it seems they’ll need to infiltrate my country?
Eggplant and peppers, shallots, garlic and cumin:
let them be, married on my plate, my country.
MORNING NEWS
Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of
bread
and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches,
repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war.
A cinder-block wall shared by two houses
is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen
sink and a cupboard, on the other was
a bed, a bookshelf, three framed photographs.
Glass is shattered across the photographs;
two half-circles of hardened pocket-bread
sit on the cupboard. There provisionally was
shelter, a plastic truck under the branches
of a fig-tree. A knife flashed in the kitchen,
merely dicing garlic. Engines of war
move inexorably towards certain houses
while citizens sit safe in other houses
reading the newspaper, whose photographs
make sanitized excuses for the war.
There are innumerable kinds of bread
brought up from bakeries, baked in the kitchen:
the date, the latitude, tell which one was
dropped by a child beneath the bloodied branches.
The uncontrolled and multifurcate branches
of possibility infiltrate houses’
walls, window frames, ceilings. Where there was
a tower, a town: ash and burnt wires, a graph
on a distant computer screen. Elsewhere, a kitchen
table’s setting gapes, where children bred
to branch into new lives were culled for war.
Who wore this starched smocked cotton dress?
Who woreof the district soccer team?
Who left this black bread
and this flat gold bread in their abandoned houses?
Whose father begged for mercy in the kitchen?
Whose memory will frame the photograph
and use the memory for what it was
never meant for by this girl , that old man,
who was
caught on a ball-field, near a window: war,
exhorted through the grief a photograph
revives. (Or was the team a covert branch
of a banned group; were maps drawn in the kitchen,
a bomb thrust in a hollowed loaf of bread?)
What did the old men pray for in their houses
of prayer, the teachers teach in schoolhouses
between blackouts and blasts, when each word was
flensed by new censure, books exchanged for bread,
both hostage to the happenstance of war?
Sometimes the only schoolroom is a kitchen.
Outside the window, black strokes on a graph
of broken glass, birds line up on bare branches.
“This letter curves, this one spreads its
branches
like friends holding hands outside their houses.”
Was the lesson stopped by gunfire? Was
there panic, silence? Does a torn photograph
still gather children in the teacher’s kitchen?
Are they there meticulously learning war-
time lessons with the signs for house, book, bread?
Marilyn Hacker was born in New York City in 1942.
She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including
Essays on Departure (Carcanet Press, 2006) Desesperanto,
(W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003); First Cities:
Collected Early Poems 1960-1979 (2003); Squares
and Courtyards(2000); Winter Numbers (1994), which
won the Lenore Marshall PoetryPrize and a Lambda
Literary Award; Selected Poems, 1965-1990 (1994),which
received the Poets' Prize; Love, Death, and the
Changing of the Seasons (1986); Assumptions (1985);
Taking Notice (1980); Going Back to the River (1990),
for which she received a Lambda Literary Award;
Separations (1976); and Presentation Piece (1974),
which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy
of American Poets and a National Book Award winner.
She has also translated Vénus Khoury-Ghata's poetry:
Nettles (2008) She Says (2003) both from the Graywolf
Press, and Here There Was Once a Country (Oberlin
College Press, 2001), as well as books by Guy Goffette,
Claire Malroux and Marie Etienne. Hacker was editor
of The Kenyon Review from 1990 to 1994, and has
received numerous honors, including an Award in
Literature from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, the Prix Max Jacob étranger in France,
the John Masefield Memorial Award and the Robert
F. Winner Awards of the Poetry Society of America.
She lives in New York City and Paris.
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