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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4368 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Our Bones Cry for Quick Release Gary Blankenship From a dialogue, following a poem about Warsaw Ghetto. In the Balkans, 2000 of Napoleon’s soldiers found in a mass grave, frozen, out of gas on their way down the thruway from Moscow, and they will be followed followed and followed. We drift through lagoon and backwater past hemlock in drought-driven ponds, water-moccasins and rapids like leaves left behind by a century frozen in genocide. In a French museum, the bones of a 40,000 year old Neanderthal child, forgotten unfed since the revolution, the last born until the first poet who looked out into his garden and saw a thistle is not a rose. We drift and listen for rats lost in badger holes, flies left behind as winter gathers warmth, hawkbeard sprouts under shopping mall tarmac, poems unlike the sermons we’ve heard before. In the killing fields, under sand and rice and fields of hibiscus, lie bones yet to be discovered – saints slain by barbarians, heathens by saints, the farmer with his ox and lamb, child absent mother in the name of love, for God, state, flag, differences exaggerated, similarities ignored. We drift through dust and smoke, mud and fog, the bones of petrified ancestors rap their message in untranslatable code; and we repeat, repeat, repeat and repeat until our bones are lost |
