At War
- after Adrienne Rich’s Dedications

I know you are reading this poem
hunkered down in a hillside bunker under waving guns,
wiping sweat from the index finger of your right hand.
You are reading this poem because there are bombs
exploding around and inside you, shells nicking your face
as if shaving in a cracked hotel mirror.
I know you are reading this poem because it’s all
the more reason not to die an undernourished aberration
in the blazing scape of rubble.
You are neither fighter nor lover here,
soldier with an audience of crushed antiseptic
bottles and bloodied limbs askew and floating
severed from their flesh harbors.
I know you are reading this poem not by firelight or candle,
but by the reflection of small mushrooming sulfur clouds
in the scraped butt end of your gunmetal.
We pretend to know about each other’s lives -
dreaming of one and afraid of the other, knowing only that
make-believe is sanctioned without benefit of escape
to the San Fernando foothills or Pacific Coast Highway,
without comfort in the occasional rumble of the San Andreas and
without the unfortunate dislocation of the rich by fires, wind, and mud.
I know you are reading this poem for the child you find
screaming while peering through a chink in the plaster
of what used to be her bedroom,
clutching her bayonet-shredded doll close.
This could have been Belgrade, Birmingham, or Baghdad,
could have been clubbed to death by the blunt force of compassion,
could have saved the families whose farms were cleared of pigs
to make room for missiles.
I know you are reading this poem like scripture,
a foxhole in the ground beneath your bleeding heels, reading
for a lover whose kisses rain down into your mouth
like the blood nectar of a grape
at war with its tangled and spiraling vine.
In your fields, the blades of grass have been choked out
by corpses like molasses in veins of soil, yet you are
reading still, sheltering your ears from the din and wishing
upon a bed coil, cursing the American Way
and all the others too.
You are reading this poem to the beat of explosions,
each one a crimson throat glistening in twilight -
swallowing your home, your books,

your market, church, and elementary school.
You will read this forever because its notion was laid out by an old friend
eloquently and in native tongue,
spitting out teeth and dirt and shrapnel and crying,
because each word was a penance.
I know you are reading this poem because body and blood are one
and the next air strike will begin at dawn.
You are reading, listening hard for enough silence to fall
asleep, curling against yourself
in the last ditch
in the last corner
of the last city
to ever hear the beauty of a footfall,
dreaming of other poems to be read in other bunkers
across the globe,
none beginning and none ending with what you know.