Poems by Karin Spitfire
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A Chechen poet writes
How does the world forget us/Suffer our massacre /with such indifference?
by Karin Spitfire
From Canary Summer 2014
Karin has lived at the tidal mouth of the Passagassawakaeg River and W. Penobscot Bay for 27 years, just above where the sardine factory operated until 2001.
Chechnya, Bosnia, Rwanda,
Somalia, Darfur
just the names
recoil off my eardrums
a finger touching a hot stove
Three days after cancer killed my brother
my nephew got his own malignancy markers
Earlier that summer, the men discussed
their yearly application of chem-lawn
and were happy with less clover, fewer bees
Can I say one shock
blocks another, the next
A slew of us
still in reaction to Columbus, slavery
Dachau, the mess of every veteran’s battle,
or a very specific domestic war
on children, women and crabgrass
I plead guilty
Can I say I am safe and I like it
that I had the same poet’s question
in my father’s house at seven
and I have learned not to hear
that cry coming from every third
door in my neighborhood
never mind across the continents
I lived, I got out
circumvented the myriad missteps available
didn’t get caught in the sex-traffic route waiting for me
Can I say I am struggling in my limbic system
for a ceasefire
slow-going, meticulous work
making a biodynamic farm
from the rubble
or at least something
that yields
more rows of repetitive movements of peace
more cross-pollinating compassion
than harm to self or others
something possibly as relentless as
each year’s upturned crop of rocks
I lived: so I compost
Can I say I don’t think it is enough
But I work to keep myself from
going down the redundant paths
of finger-pointing, they-saying,
bursts of fury
I feed the truce
I work to keep myself from yapping
without a lick of action,
grief pooling
into cement of despair,
I wrack the pleura free
I weep to keep my heart open
Can I be unarmed
in the wide-open next step
Hear the underlying drone of love
while the bees are disappearing?
© Karin Spitfire