Bleeding

Taken from The Dailey:

(both poems by Robert Wrigley)

RADIO

First, there were women who ended
pregnancies, which explained the airplanes
crashing into buildings, though these
were also assisted by the thought of women marrying
women, or men marrying men. The need
to invade a country not at all involved
was obvious, even if the reason was not.
Then later, no one in authority knew anything about it,
but anyone could see the naked prisoners were
arranged
so as to duplicate American pornography,
even if they suffered no more than in a harmless
fraternity
hazing. All of this was made clear on a drive over
the mountains, a Thursday night, only one
unnaturally powerful radio station coming in,
as I drove through small towns in continual decline
despite their fealtyto the dominant political party,
and through a forest, some of which would soon begone,
to keep it from burning.

PRAYER FOR THE WAR PRESIDENT
September 2004

Lord, not that he should be required to read
poetry, but that if called upon he could,
and thus would see fit to admire the shapes
of assertions, not only their political use.
Not that he must know how it feels to die,
but that he might recognize what it means
to ask others to do so in his stead,
and thus to say in the plainest of terms
there is nothing I will not do to not do that
which should have been the last thing I did.
Not that we'd expect such a promise in blood
or flesh, though both would be appropriate
from any decent man who asks to lead
and leads with neither shape or recognition
into that place he himself would not go,
neither in the flesh nor the mind. Amen.