I Will Wake Again in Darkness

Poem about 9/11. 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/13366779

LEARNER full text (2024)

PeaceWorld or death

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/13381922 

APPRENTI texte integral (2024)

Le monde paisible ou la mort

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID

Poems, mine and theirs  

I dedicate this poem to Robert Fisk, the author of The War for Civilization, Pity the Nation, and The Way of the Warrior. Passionate humanist, whistleblower and expert journalist, one of the Last of the Just. A rare voice of sanity in a media-driven wilderness of lies, waste and terror, he exposes the hypocrisy of WeaponWorld and the bigotry of its collaborators in their forever war of corporate indulgence.  

I Will Wake Again in Darkness  

Another Boeing slouches homeward 

In a drunkard’s wind-blown ramble, 

Its amber eyes pale this Ganges night, 

Its tiger roar snaps my reverie.  

How could such fat geese stab harmless landmarks? 

Cast them into our arms like dying buddies, 

Bleeding flame, smoke and cinder ash, 

Weeping bodies like all too heavy tears.  

Monsters, victims and heroes alike: 

Unbiased, the rubble buried everyone. 

A step pyramid had to be cut out in negative 

To bare them, bear them tenderly away, 

Swearing sacred payback  

Breathing hard from heartfelt labor to retrieve the dead: 

Family-bound by blood, by friendship, as perished first responders, 

Or the innocent flesh of unknown victims.  

The ash from that rubble, 

Mixed with who knows what; 

Those sturdy, broad shouldered bearers, 

That hellish dust ate them up, so as 

Too soon rejoin the ghosts they had eased to rest.  

The rich put up a gleaming monument to themselves

And ripped out those sad, emblematic white girders

Torn pennants over a lost battlefield

And swept away all the crime scene evidence.

Will harsh fall daybreaks draw us back into the warmth, 

Revived from the dead of winter, as foretold? 

And will sweet May breezes soothe fevered temples 

Five times a day, as at prayer?   

So that everyone may stand tall, 

Above all, the children, their head held high. 

A shy smile on their lips, perhaps, 

Their eyes agleam and heart in bloom?  

I will wake again in darkness 

And quietly make up my bed, 

The way a night-dropped agent 

Might bundle up his parachute 

And stretch an ear for shadow friends.  

IN FRENCH

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