The Garden of Tears: Ask Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela, and now Yemen About America's 'Gifts' to the World

America needs to change the way it does business with the rest of the world.

And there’s one business in particular we should get out of: Selling arms to tyrants who wish to kill their neighbors.

In fact, to judge our intentions by our actions, the United States is no longer building weapons of war for the purpose of defending ourselves against potential enemies. We’re inventing wars in order to sell weapons.

That’s the conclusion drawn by Kathy Kelly, who has visited our war zones all over the world, founded the nonprofit Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org), and in recent weeks has been speaking to small groups meetings in Massachusetts churches.

Here is one of her conclusions:

“We in the United States have yet to realize both the futility and immense consequences of war even as we develop, store, sell, and use hideous weapons. The number of children killed is rising.”

We heard Kelly speak at a church in Walpole, Mass., where she came to put a spotlight on the current, ongoing example of America’s willingness to support a war by a rich country on a poor country — for no justifiable cause — but out of an apparent desire to keep business flowing for our prosperous armaments industry.

The victim of this war is Yemen, a poor Middle Eastern country of nearly 30 million people, often described as ‘backward,’ that has the misfortune to the be the neighbor of a large, wealthy, disastrously governed sheikdom called Saudi Arabia.

A few days after we heard Kelly, she posted this news: “At 9:30 in the morning of March 26, the entrance to a rural hospital in northwest Yemen supported by Save the Children was teeming as patients waited to be seen and employees arrived at work. Suddenly, missiles from an airstrike hit the hospital, killing seven people, four of them children.”

Those missiles and the explosives inside them were almost certainly supplied to the Saudi government by the US. We also sold the Saudis the absurdly expensive aircraft which poured death upon patients waiting at a hospital to see a doctor.

One might ask: How do we live with that?

When we heard Kelly speak in a church hall in Walpole, a Boston suburb, she also suggested this motivation for America’s continued and destructive meddling in the affairs of other countries. Since the end of the Cold War we have assumed the right to throw our weight around, both openly and covertly when and wherever we choose: If a government doesn’t run its country in a way we approve of, the United States will do what it can to take that government down.

And we don’t care what the damage is. Ask Afghanistan.

After the Taliban government of that country provided protection for Al Queda terrorists who attacked America on nine-eleven, we had cause to invade and overthrow a terrorist-protecting government. But once that goal was accomplished, we refused to go home.

We’re still there today, throwing fuel on that unhappy country’s domestic fires in the form of endless weaponry, protection money and occasional bribery, while holding out the delusional hope of crushing the Taliban opposition.

Afghanistan has paid a steep price for our continued intervention. In the eighteen years of what Afghans call ‘the American war’ more than 150,000 Afghans have been killed, an estimated 40,000 of them civilians.

American casualties are almost 2,400 military deaths, plus another 1,700 civilian and contractor deaths. The financial cost is measured in the trillions. Last year the Congressional Budget Office put the cost at $2.4 trillion.

Ask the Venezuelans.

Because Washington disapproved of their popularly elected Socialist government that raised the standard of living for the country’s poor and even provided low-cost heating oil for American fuel assistance programs in the 1990s, the Bush administration took part in a failed coup attempt to remove President Hugo Chavez, back in 2002. Under Obama, American sanctions exacerbated Venezuela’s economic problems (initially caused by falling oil prices and its government’s mismanagement of currency exchange rates), even though current President Maduro was popularly elected in 2013 to continue Chavez’s policies. Now, of course, we have a bombastic blowhard-in-chief who has basically called for a military coup by Maduro’s opponents.

Meanwhile civilians line up for food. Many seek to flee the county and become refugees.

Or, ask the Iraqis. Because some Islamic country (other than Afghanistan) had to pay for the nine-eleven attack by an terror organization founded and headed by Saudi leaders, and mounted by Saudi nationals, GW Bush invented a pretext to invade Iraq.

That country is still trying to recover from the war’s disastrous consequences. Estimates of Iraq’s death toll range from half million dead to a catastrophic 2.4 million. ISIS, which arose after the US war threw the country into chaos, contributed some of these.

On the American side, the casualty toll is 4,425 deaths and near 32, 000 wounded in action. The financial cost to the US taxpayers is again estimated in the trillions of dollars.

Now it’s Yemen’s turn.

What did Yemen do to us? (you may ask). Absolutely nothing.

Why then do we support with airplanes, armaments, active involvement in combat missions, and huge war machinery and armament transfers to the blatant aggressor state, Saudi Arabia, in its wholly unjustified war knowingly waged on Yemen’s civilian population.

International organizations with worldwide credibility such as Save the Children estimate that 85,000 children under age 5 alone have been killed by Saudi attacks and disruptions of Yemen’s economic and social system. Thousands of children have starved to death.

According to UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, and other international organizations, a cholera epidemic has killed more than 2,000 people and infected almost a million.

The famine caused by Saudi attacks on Yemen’s food supply system has put millions of people, including 400,000 children, on the edge of starvation.

Only recently, after three years of this war on children and other living things, has the obscene slaughter moved the American Congress to express its disapproval of our role in enabling these daily war crimes.

Reporting on her decades of visiting overseas war zones, protesting wars and weapons of mass destruction, and backing humanitarian measures, Kathy Kelly came to Massachusetts with a local message. The conflagration in Yemen may appear far way, she told us, but its fires are lighted “right in our backyard. Massachusetts-based Raytheon Company is a key player in the war crimes being committed in this epic human disaster.”

Raytheon has headquarters in Waltham, and weapon-making labs and factories in Cambridge, Burlington, Woburn and five other Eastern Massachusetts communities. It’s as American as apple pie. Only the pies blow up in people’s faces, and kill them.

After a laser-guided 500-pound bomb stuck a water-drilling site in Yemen, killing 31 civilians, the debris included a piece of the bomb’s wing assembly, with a stock number and date of date of manufacture that showed it was built by nobody but Raytheon.

Proud supplier of this murderous moment, we ask: What do you say when history calls you to account for the use made of your fine products?

As ‘host’ to this hub of America’s military industrial complex, Massachusetts is the technology hive for preparing the deadly bombs, missiles, planes and targeting systems for Saudi Arabia’s war crimes against people who pose no threat to America. Nor, for that matter, have they done any harm to the Saudis — except to refuse to knuckle under.

In this last respect, Saudi Arabia has done nothing more than model its egregious might-makes-right policies on those of other powerful countries — a leading example being the USA.

American ‘foreign policy’ needs a complete top-to-bottom shake-out. It didn’t happen during the eight years of the Obama administration. In mitigation of the former President’s backing of Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, Kelly said that Obama had reduced American support for Saudi aggression before the end of his term. The arrival of the current bellicose Pretender, however, signaled a green light for war-makers of all description:

Saudis, Israel, CIA contractors and clients: Take what you want, kill all you need to.

Even better if you’re willing to buy our latest, high-priced, deadly swag.

A final thought from Kathy Kelly:‘Every War Is a War Against Children.’

    

          

The Garden of Verse: Poets Bring Their 'Bests' to March Issue of Verse-Virtual

For the March issue of Verse-Virtual editor Firestone Feinberg chose "my best poem" as a voluntary theme. He reports receiving "some terrific responses."      

            Here's one: "Deer Crossing," by Penny Harter, relates the disturbingly frequent daytime appearances of a local deer population, including carcasses on the highway, to the hidden processes of human consciousness. After reporting sightings of a a dead buck and doe on the highway, the poem takes a strong psychological leap:

"I only know the boundaries are blurring:
that buck whose antlers flowered on his head
like found money,
slept in your bed last night,
that doe in mine,
while we stumbled in our nakedness,
running on all fours..." 

            I love the image of the flowering of the antlers "like found money," and the feeling the whole poem give me that, yes, this is how dreams work.
 

            Donna Hilbert's offering of 'a best' is the short poem "Gravity" that serves "as a sort of foreword" to her book of the same name. This poem has me on its first line "What binds me to this earth..." Its four appearances by the word "mother" anchor the poem to a spiritual gravity and the culminating "miracle" that is its message. If you haven't read the poem, please do.

            I'm not sure if the poem "To the Mother of a Dead Marine" by Marilyn Taylor is offered as a 'best poem,' but it certainly belongs to that discussion. A sonnet, the poet tells us, is the suitable form for distancing the self in order to "write genuinely difficult poems."

            And its context of confronting the mother of "a dead marine" surely meets that threshold. In its packed 14 lines we find such images as

"Could I have been the beast he rode to war?
The battle mounted in his sleep, the rounds
of ammunition draped like unblown blossoms
round his neck?"

            These 'unblown blossom' are not found money, or anything beautiful, but something closer to 'fleurs du mal.' Amazingly strong writing in one of those poems that, as the poet tells us, "scare" us to write.

            It can't be a complete accident, can it, that so many of these strong poems speak of death? When Scott Waters' poem "capitulation" begins with mention of soldiers, we are prepared to cross the border to that final country again, but this poem takes us elsewhere. Its formal elements -- the repetition of the line "these soldiers on the hill," and the delayed rhyme that concludes each stanza -- are highly satisfying. The poem feels like a prayer -- of thanks, or appeal.

            Poet Alan Walowitz presents what he describes as "my best recent poem about getting old. " Sometimes a good poem is a really good story told really well. Here's the money shot in the poem titled "Road Kill":

"Like when you finally--and against your better judgment--say, I love you
to one so dear you’d even be willing to bear the silence
such a proclamation might inspire.
Then the voice of the lady from Waze, seductive as a Siren,
wakes you soft and sweet, and without the heavy breathing
you’d counted on any time you used to be lashed to the mast,
and finds a new way to make you listen:
Roadkill on road ahead, she sings,
and there you are, looking for the corpse,..."

            The poem makes very good use of this magic technological moment in exploring the complexities of the aging human condition. I'm beginning to think the "lady from Waze" deserves to be acknowledged as a player in many of our stories. Her three-word title sounds like something out of a contemporary "Idylls of the King."

             Among the many other fine poems in the issues, Joan Mazza's ekphrastic poem "Blown Away" speaks eloquently to the power of a female figure:

"assembled of gears and sinuous metal scrap, windswept yet holding firm to form."

        You have to see the photo of the sculpture by Penny Hardy and read the rest of the poem to appreciate its evocation of the figure's "self-made light."

            Steve Klepetar's poems continue to put to rest any questions I may have had about the impact of winter in Berkshire County, or I suspect, in any other piece of country in the northern states outside the big cities. The answer is intense, sometimes spooky, and always metaphysical. In a poem titled "Halfway Through the Month" we encounter these aspects of the wintry mix and more.

"Night has fallen, and you have
returned through the yard,
your face pressed cold against
window glass.
In the streetlight you look
so pale and old, shrunk
to a child’s body, and then,
when I look again, no body at all..."

            Nor do I ask who the "you" is in these lines, or why "you look so pale and old," and "shrunk to a child’s body," or why that body is almost immediately transformed to "no body at all." The reference is to everything 'out there' -- and probably everything 'in here' as well.   

            Robert Wexelblatt's poem "Naming and Dividing" belongs to a discussion of anybody's best poems. It's an encyclopedia of finely wrought lines and provocative lists, from the first stanza's "Newborns need milk, love, and names"

...to its demonstration of why classification is a purely, and essentially human task:

"The droning plains and rhyming
hills, the singular salt ocean and the
immeasurable eons, these care nothing
for our dividing and naming, no more than
a pack of wolves padding across some line drawn
to fix Wyoming south of Montana..."

...to the poem's tangy lists of places and names -- "Baltimore, Bamako, Bryn Athyn, the Bronx" -- to pick just a very few.

           And its culminating sense of completion through rhyme:   

"Give us latitudes and longitudes
and we’ll make a map and scribe a border,
we’ll christen streets, name neighborhoods
to limn a reassuring order."

            More good verses surely lay ahead. Editor FF has roped the April issue into the best poem rodeo

The Garden of Verse: W.S. Merwin and the Postwar Poets

The death of the poet W.S. Merwin last week caused me to think about matters that I haven't recalled in a long time. I felt bad, of course, that an important voice in a form of human expression I love has gone quiet, just as if a star blinked out in the firmament. Yes, there are other stars... but, still.

            My first response to news of his death -- and the full page, beautifully researched and written obituary the New York Times published last Saturday, March 16 -- was regret that I had failed to find my way to his poetry in recent years. And that, in fact, I would have to go back a long way back in the storehouse of memory to summon recollections of encounters with someone so widely acknowledged as a force in American poetry.

            But this was not my only slight. That storehouse librarian of the past, unreliable as he no doubt is, also revealed empty shelves where the books of other important poets should be. And certainly could be.

            We are losing their witness. The poets who saw the last World War, and the years of recovery from it, are dying off. We know that American WWII veterans -- my father among them -- are now largely gone, so this expanding vacuum should not be news to anyone (even me).

            But when I read about the poets that Merwin knew personally, studied under, or otherwise encountered, I came across much of the roster of the American and English poets whose works I read in the late sixties and seventies. Back when I began quietly, mostly privately, auditioning for the role of poet.

            To start with, Merwin (as I read in www.poets.org) was born in 1927, which means he was only 18 when World War II ended. He was not of an age of those called upon to serve in the military for that war, but those whose adolescence fell under its shadow. (My father, for comparison, was 21 when he enlisted in 1942.)

            According to poets.org, Merwin was part of a poetry hot spot at Princeton University, where he arrived just at the war's end and studied under the influential critic R.P. Blackmur, one of the major lights in the school of thought known as New Criticism. That was still the fashion in my college years and was explained to me as restricting criticism's role to a "close reading" of poetic texts while avoiding biography or other other concerns -- perhaps, it occurs to me now, as a way to avoid the ideological struggles of the earlier decades of the 20th century, when Marxism, social realism, and reactions such as McCarthyism, were the lenses through which literature was often regarded.

            In view of the return to the ideological approach of "critical studies" criticism in recent decades, a destructive academic fashion in my view, maybe the 'new critics' were on to something.

            I discovered in the same source that Blackmur's teaching assistant at Princeton was John Berryman. There's a name I can recall with enthusiasm. I loved Berryman's "Dream Songs," some of them new published when I read them. I was fascinated by the device of filtering the poet's own thoughts and experiences through an invented poor schmuck of a character ("Henry") to achieve the detachment perhaps necessary to write lines such as:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

so heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more; & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

Henry could not make good.

            Third-person indirect is a common technique in writing fiction, but using it in verse seemed to me to deliver an extra power, abetted of course by Berryman's powerful, funky voice (as in "in all them time").  

Young, impossibly talented, tragically destined: we read her cries and whispers and asked how can we live in a world where nobody stepped in to save Sylvia Plath?

             I could not wait to try this out on my own, though I don't remember if I did. Frankly just reading these lines, and the following two to end the stanza -- "Starts again always in Henry’s ears/ the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime." -- makes me want to go there again.

            Merwin's career then crosses other intriguing paths. At Princeton he was a classmate of Galway Kinnell, another highly regarded poet in that 'just-after' world war generation, whose Selected Poems (1980) won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Kinnell, who died in 1984, is another poet on my guilt list; I've never read him except for accidental crossings in a publication.

            Some time after graduating from college, publishing his first book, and winning a major prize, Merwin was awarded a fellowship that brought him to Cambridge, Mass. Living in Boston, the source tells us, "he entered the circle of writers that surrounded Robert Lowell and decided to concentrate on poetry."

            When it comes to postwar American poets, Lowell has always been the leader in the clubhouse. He's the only poet of this generation whose work I came across in an "American Studies" course. Poems from "Life Studies" and "For the Union Dead" provided my first experience of a contemporary voice on contemporary issues, including the poet's own 'problems.'

            World War II is both subject and experience for this poet, who became a conscientious objector because of the war and spent time in jail for draft refusal. Lowell's first 'major poem' was an elegy for the death of his cousin, who enlisted and drowned in the North Atlantic after his ship was targeted and sunk by the enemy. "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket" draws on the tradition of 'elegy' in English poetry, but then expands it by alluding not to classical elegies (as Milton and Shelley did) but to classic American texts.

            Poet Robert Haas (in "A Little Book on Form") points out that Lowell echoed lines and imagery from Thoreau's book "Cape Cod." Thoreau was describing his search for remains and personal effects from the wreck of a ship from Galway, Ireland, carrying many immigrants and some Americans (including Margaret Fuller):

"I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the clothes were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl..."

            Lowell wrote: "Flushed from his matted head and marble feet..."

            Merwin and his first wife left then Boston for Europe and lived in London where they encountered -- who else but Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes? Plath, born in 1932 and still a child in Depression America when the world war began, was already dead when late sixties young people discovered her work. In my experience, she was the only poet read by non-English majors. She was on the top of my list for 'contemporary' poets in those days because of the linguistic intensity of her confrontations with her own experience; that sense of shouting in the dark that we all sometimes feel, perhaps particularly when young.   

           Young, impossibly talented, tragically destined -- we read the poet's cries and whispers and asked how can we live in a world where no one stepped in to save Sylvia Plath.

           Hughes, born in 1930, was a highly regarded postwar poet in England. Though I tried to admire the poems in his book "Crow," Hughes never really moved the needle for me. I have read recently that in postwar England only three poets mattered: Phillip Larkin, Hughes, and Thom Gunn. My attempts at reading Gunn, born in 1939 and apparently regarded as an 'anti-establishment' working class voice, left me wondering what the fuss was about. Possibly, his 'outsider' stance paled in comparison to the vitality of the American protest and social criticism poetry of Ginsberg and the other Beats, that fed other voices of the Sixties.

            Phillip Larkin, in contrast, is exactly the other kind of poet, so rigorous and exacting that his poems appear at times to hover right on the edge between brilliant and precious. Yet Larkin is famous in the macro-culture for a single Sixties-sounding line: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad.."

           I'll get out the way here and allow two of Merwin's poems ("Thanks," and "Yesterday") to speak for themselves:

Thanks

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

standing by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

our lost feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

Yesterday   (W.S. Merwin)

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand I say yes I understand
he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know
even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes
he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me
oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father’s hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me
oh yes I say
but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here
I say nothing
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don’t want to keep you
I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know
though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do