Kosovo

banrlowres


	Kosovo "You cannot do justice to the dead." -- Lord Shawcross Any place seemed suitable for the slaughter, Crowded in a cellar, on a hill, In a ditch beside the road, in a field. Something about the inertia of corpses: How they lie there askew, As if sprinkled from the sky, In a way that only objects can lie. Men, women, and children, whole worlds discarded, Deposited by history In this squallid danse macabre For peasants only. No time for beating or hacking now, The bullets hurried from automatic muzzles, More discreet, efficient, and harder to observe By ever-present airborn spies. (Not God nor Allah perhaps, but NATO, Forced at last to act in Their stead.) While gray-bearded sages-- some with degrees-- Argued it was not in our vital interest To take to heart the spilling of a country, The faces and braids and innocent limbs Tumbled day after day from the farms and towns, Trudging silently like the Magi, Into the lenses of the world. Frail old men with shattered eyes, Met at the border by microphones, Chanted the littany of the fallen: The brother, the cousins, a cousin's son . . . And the kerchiefed women recounted the rapes Of others, not their own, And clutched to their bosoms Those children who were left them-- All those they could find. And silver-tufted Slobadan, Trafficker in blood, scavenger of power, Bemoaned the persecution of the Serbs, Looking fatherly and sane on CNN. And the expensive experts dressed all in grey Who had counseled a vigorous wringing of hands, Turned away once more from the face of evil and Went back to their golf swings On the carpeted greens of Georgetown, Westchester and Langley, Planning exit strategies from spent affairs, Boring marriages, bad investments. The Yugoslav man in the street interview Asked,"Why us poor Serbs? We thought we were friends. Now look what you did to our bridges and buildings." The national thumb twitches on the remote control. The faces, the crowds, the tents dissolve Into Ab Crunchers, anointings, and talking monkies Raving about that fickle NASDAQ, Just a little disappointed down deep there was No Highway of Death, or armies roasted live Getting fed to the Balkan buzzards. The peace is anti-climactic, untelegenic, just peace.. Amid the charred houses and excavations Of mass graves-- Unsatisfying like a tied game, a low score, Or a made-for-TV movie To Be Continued. Copyright 2000 by H. L. Rucks. All rights reserved.


	The Good Life Through the concrete canyons passes A general exhalation, like a sigh of relief, Breath of paper, smoke, debris of time--; At long last the boats Tilt their sails toward Suburbia, Grass-lit land of super Everything best and better Where the Dream Homes Stretch to infinity And the furniture awaits its prey Crouched in deep carpet like lions; And begins again the trance Of leisure. No flint to strike, water to haul, Skins to scrape, or fires to tend-- Nothing to interrupt the sacred Communion with comfort, The sleep of conscience, Waves of untroubled being. Here all the caravans Of the world converge. On the fruited plains; The earth that once shuddered Beneath the bison's hoof Now throbs with the great Beating pulse of the Economy And almost all is well. Copyright 2000 by H. L. Rucks. All rights reserved.


	The Grizzly How I long never to meet one With his photogenic drooling teeth Towering on hind-legs like Alexander about to devour all Persia. He's not the only of our erstwhile rivals Who still picnics from time to time On the occasional upright primate: There's the shark, the croc, The lion, the tiger, even the wolf Of late taking children in rural India. Outlaws of the wild are many But none quite so fierce on land As the grizzly-- none able to stand So tall, so ruthless, so unimpressed With science or learning As the grizzly, when he's hungry, And in his own habitat.-- Completely ammoral, rapacious, Almost psychopathic, but for the eating Of the victims, which only Dahmer And perhaps a few others ever did. On land the grizzly is the supreme predator; Though you must admit, 18,209 Homicide victims last year were not Exactly killed and eaten by grizzlies. Copyright 2000 by H. L. Rucks. All rights reserved.


	The Orca Are Disappearing They say, by recent counts, The orca are disappearing. Leaping, striped, streamlined Acrobats of the deep With secret knowing smiles, Who had survived the Permian Mass Extinction-- Not to mention enduring The loneliness of the deep Without superstition or genocide In an infinity of pathless water Across eons of unrecorded time. Now they prepare to leave The oceans vacant, The Earth without orca song Or orca dance forever. Copyright 2000 by H. L. Rucks. All rights reserved.


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