Guest Artist Archives, 2010

                                      Scroll down to find a specific poet.
                              (in chronological order of original posting):

                                                   Elizabeth Barger
                                                       Marisol Ruiz
                                                       Chris Brandt
                                                       Julia Jewett
                                                   Mary Ellen Sanger

  
  Elizabeth Barger

  EYELESS IN GAZA       
           Ichabod is not a funny name* 

  A glamor of violence
  is thrown over all our days.
  Even the blind in Gaza
  wonder how
  freedom will rise
  out of all this pain. 

  Hate is a terrible teacher.
  Generations survived from Warsaw
  remember the lesson
  too well,
  and have become its professors.
  What must we do
  when brothers and sisters
  kill each other
  without apology.
  "He started it,"
  they protest,
  pointing rockets at each other. 

  Sarah, will your heart be
  forever hard
  to keep Hagar’s children
  outcast always?
  Death is unforgiving
  and leaves only room for sorrow.
  Silence will not save us,
  the moat of distance is a lie. 

  * After hearing of a terrible defeat and death in battle,the wife
  of one of the slain generals named her newborn son Ichabod.
  It meanseternal sorrow and shame.


  (Originally posted May 3, 2009)

  To contact Elizabeth Barger send an email to: steve@stevebloompoetry.net
  and I will pass it on for you.

  Marisol Ruiz

  MUMIA ABU-JAMAL ON DEATH ROW

  He smiles...


   (Originally posted July 7, 2009)

  To contact Marisol Ruiz send an email to spfccmt@verizon.net
      

  Chris Brandt

  FOR HENRY KISSINGER

  Is it too late to curse you, Henry?
  Is it time to have the years obscure your crimes?
 
  Time to close that chapter,
  let bygones be gone, give it a rest, let it be?

  No.
  It is not too late, Henry.

  And thus begins our curse:
  Be it never too late,

  be the voices you hear in your dotage
  your victims’ shouting Assassin! Thief!

  Because you sat well-tailored in handsome offices
  and sent others out to prove your power,

  because you wrote, "With proper tactics
  nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears",

  because you found white phosphorous a useful tool
  and napalm a tolerable arm of diplomacy,

  and agent orange necessary
  to policy, and tiger cages,

  because you didn’t understand why we should allow a country to go
  communist on account of its own people’s ignorance,

  because you enjoyed the company of Pinochet
  Marcos, Duvalier, Stroessner Somoza, the Shah,

  because you regretted Laos and Cambodia—
  "We should have found some other way of doing it",
 
  because you killed Allende and shattered Neruda's heart
  as surely as if you had held the gun yourself,
 
  because you accepted the Nobel Peace Prize,
  because in the mirror you see a god — Hermes, Loki,

  because you have a mind for deciding life and death,
  and it’s pure injustice of history that you're not still doing it—

  may the insects refuse to touch you, may the worms spit you back,
  may you never know decay’s comfort and rest.

  Let the voices follow you always.
  Let the burning children run toward you forever

  clasping you in their flaming arms.
  Let your eternal waiting room be

  the stadium in Santiago, filled with silent prisoners filing 
  past. Each one stops to look at you, 

  and you, with all the time in the world
  cannot look away.

  None mentions bruises, burns,
  missing fingernails, teeth, faces,

  each only recites a name — 
  Elena, Nguyen, Christofis, Bobby Jene, Laureano,

  and one of them hands you a snapshot of his daughters,
  another his unused high school registration card,

  a third the unfinished history of her family,
  a fourth holds out a stuffed penguin, won

  at a carnival moments before his arrest,
  the next carries nothing, having no hands,

  gives you only her look, and whispers 
  a poem, a hymn to the wind.

  The line of the disappeared goes on and on
  and you will stand rooted,

  seeing them at last. And always,
  always will you hear the songs of love

  Victor Jara continues to sing, 
  even without

  his tongue.


  (Originally posted July 7, 2009)

  To contact Chris Brandt send an email to chribrndt@aol.com
                              

  Julia Jewett

  HIDE AND SEEK

  I caught a poem seed today;
  Yes, I did.
  It thought itself invisible
  But I was standing still;
  It’s pollen floated near my heart
  And rooted in.


  (Originally posted July 25, 2009)

  To contact Julia Jewett send an email to jmjewett@gmail.com
  

  Mary Ellen Sanger

  SUN DIARY

  The sky pearls to morning and she unfurls from her sarape to light the fire.
  Warmth tendrils into the chill around her hearth.
  With the first spit of sun, she heats black coffee and shapes fresh tortillas,
  wiping her hands on a green plaid apron fringed with eyelet.
  Venus reflects in the water tub as she scrubs her face.
  She prods her son and her daughter to awaken.
  They walk far to their cornfield struggling skyward,
  cradled in a cupped palm between mountains.
  She digs, digs and pulls up by deep roots the weeds that creep between rows
     of green stalks.
  She knows their resistance, and lays them gently in a swelling heap.
  She sorts out the delicate verdolagas for dinner.
  With the sun at eye level, in the wrinkled shade of a ceiba,
  she gives her daughter water from a gourd.
  She mounds red earth round her plants, and with a frayed blue rebozo
  wipes sweat and dust from her neck.
  At noon they rest and eat tortillas and hard-cooked eggs. Her children nap.
  Back in the field, toes sunk into the earth, her son tugs her woolen skirt,
  points to the bulk of mountains surrounding them.
  The shadows are still there, a curling gloom of serpents around the base of pines.
  She looks again and they are gone.
  You only see bad luck from the corner of your eye.
  And suddenly they are in her field, a menace of black boots in uniforms the rank
     color of leaf-mold.
  Their guns point toward darkening clouds.
  They are many. Too many. Maybe ten. Maybe twelve.
  She asks if they would help clear her field. They are younger than she by ten.
  Thunder repeats in the air sharp with a promise of rain.
  The sun resists falling.
  She lays one earth-brown hand gently on a young soldier’s arm.
  She says “Go home. We are not the problem.”
  Her words buzz like wasps, and he pushes her, not gently, with the point of his rifle.
  The sun resists falling.
  Her daughter cries out. She picks thumb-sized flowers from the discarded weeds,
  offers a fist of petals to the steel-eyed soldier.
  Her eyes are like the lagunita where he swam as a child.
  He orders them to hush. He orders them to turn. The sun resists falling.
  He orders them to close their eyes. He orders them to kneel. The sun resists falling.
  Thunder like an avalanche, filling their ears, then nothing.
  The men slither up to the shelter of pines.  

  The family is motionless.
  There is still water in their gourds.
  A crow mourns in the distance.
  Their skin muddies in the rain-softened earth.  

  The sun sinks weary, weary into the breast of the mountain.
  Her children run ahead, carrying a morral with supper greens.
  She follows them closely, the corner of one eye trained on bad luck.
  Some days, resistance is as simple as a fistful of weeds. Others, it will not be. 


  (Originally posted September 8, 2009)

  To contact Mary Ellen Sanger send an email to mesanger@hotmail.com