Intimations of the Next World

14.

"If they move, kill 'em!"
Pike Bishop (William Holden) in "The Wild Bunch"

A Norwegian self-
appointed messiah guns
down 93 of
his fellow whites to protest
their government's policy

of inclusiveness,
sure he is saving the world
from Islamism.
Who sold him the gun, pointed
him towards The Enemy,

gave him the concept
of Manifest Destiny?
I think it was you:
you, with your old wrathful god
crounched on your shoulder like a

cancerous jackal;
you, whom he ordered to bring
death in the names of
civilization, freedom,
the technology of time,

have brought history
to the pit of extinction,
and sold the future
for the price of a wristwatch.
Ice melting in the Arctic

releases toxins
that stop the fish in their flow;
Inuits have more
than 100 names for snow,
while we need only one for

nuclear winter,
and collateral damage
rolls off our tongues like
marbles. By naming things we
believe we have controlled them--

or by killing them.
At daybreak, Coyote is
winding up his hunt
through Chaco Canyon, taking
the words right out of our mouths.

Intimations of the Next World

13.

"The land! Don't you feel it?
Doesn't it make you want to
go out and lift dead Indians
from their graves, to steal from them--
as if it must be clinging even to
their corpses--some authenticity."
William Carlos Williams

IDF bullies
point their automatic guns
at Gaza's people,
expanding their sights to the Greeks
who bear gifts of sabotage

to the tiny fleet
of ships loaded with aid, and
arrest every
person on the only one
that was able to embark.

U.S. government
with chain saws massacres old
growth of citizens,
exposes fresh budget line
items for growing new bombs,

threatens Pakistan
to stop sending them shovels
to bury their dead
from the silent drone attacks;
Hillary's Hitler mustache,

applied carefully
before a mirror, doesn't
begin to tremble
as she declares eternal
solidarity with Greece

while raising a sword
to cut off the flow of cash
from the sacred banks
whose bellies are fat with drug
dough and taxpayers' greenbacks.

On Whidbey Island,
far removed from the action,
a road construction
crew sinks its mechanical
teeth into the earth's hide and

exposes the bones
of the first people Raven
released from the clam;
the rain stops for an instant,
permits their sighs to be heard.