The Flag Is Burning
We, friend, are the body of the country
burning in the street,
eyes open against the sky,
the child running,
the mother on her knees
reaching for the soldier aiming,
the village on fire—the shrapnel littered ruins
of the hanging gardens
of Providence and Cheyenne,
snow falling over the blistered arroyo
in an ashen dance,
the stars surrendering white
over Pierre, the rain
penetrating the prairie,
the clothes and walls and pillows
spattered crimson,
the steeples congregating
in a phosphorus sky,
claiming God’s bidding.
We are the tombs of brothers and uncles,
who send our sons and daughters into battle,
in the senate and the woodshed
our ties smoldering like oil slicks,
conviction flourishing like ivy
fueled by our breath,
we are the flag and the heart
from which it was sewn,
we are the dead who gather
burning in the child’s mind,
the hunger that congregates
and cries out, never again.
______________________________________________________________________________________
To the Forty-Third President of the United States of America
Mr. President, our history speaks to us, the history of Chile
and China, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Somalia, Puerto Rico—
today, our solemn duty is to defy your willful aggression,
to parse provocative words and habits, your heroic battle
to distract us. Perhaps you think God will protect us
from the religious zealots who sanctify your rule,
from your opportunism and the race renewal,
the investiture you have assumed because, as
always, it is not yours. Let me ask
an obvious question.
If we are to establish peace
and security for our nation, must we not do
everything in our power to end
the beginnings of war, must we not allow
our imaginations to craft a lasting peace?
Are not the children you would choose
to incinerate our own? We try on masks
to trick our isolated, frightened selves,
to propagate our sacred uncertainties
among the children of this blue planet,
a world we create and ruin every day.
Mr. President,
where can we walk, where may we sit down,
where will we work or rest, weep or pray,
what field does a man sunder and seed
in a country living only in memory, dying
every day at the hands of those who profess
to love her most? They say God loves America,
and that this old bitch gone in the teeth is
heaven on earth, in preemptive violence,
in obstinacy, in entitlements for the rich,
this murdered land, this, the people’s
earth, is our reward for being right
no matter how wrong we are.
What urge and rage
thrives in the American heart, that so many cheer
this obsessive, unilateral madness?
Even through
precise layers of glass, the TV peddling
a thrilling efficiency, we cannot see them,
the ghosts that inhabit our malnourished
statistics, inhospitable closets, cold kitchens
where we eat meat and raise goblets of wine
to celebrate our belief that they are not like us.
I want to spend more time with my daughter,
my five-year-old, I want to see her, to know
she is alive. It is her evening of the morning,
she is just fine, though she implores me to tell her
the acommitation of naked truth.
I imagine
Iraqis, weakened by sanctions, spending time
with their children. What do they play together,
what makes them laugh, what crude medicine
do parents spoon down fevered throats when
they too are roused from nightmares of fragile
necklaces of bone slung around the necks of
American fighters whose hearts we camouflage?
Who will witness the small charred bodies floating
in the Tigris, children writhing in pain, in smoking rubble,
in the ruins of Bab al-Wastani or the Mirjan Mosque,
severed limbs and glazed eyes that last night
followed their favorite stories by candlelight?
Mr. President,
what does it mean when you say Saddam Hussein,
Butcher of Baghdad, official liar, terrorizes himself?
If he brings terror upon himself, will our dark angels
exterminate him or his already wounded people?
Would you answer Mr. Korb: What if Kuwait grew carrots? What if Iraq’s
major exports were fresh dates and cotton shawls
destined for white American women
longing for the exotic?
To be honest,
I’ve forgotten from what we must abstain,
yet we know how to prevent conception. C’est la vie,
you say, saddled up, ready to ride with your posse
across oil fields just like those in Texas.
It appears the one thing we cherish
more than petroleum or our children
is the greased machinery of destruction.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Afghanistan
Brokenhearted, shuddering land—
the shadows of tall palms melt
like the hands of children
in the blood dark dust.
William O'Daly has translated eight books of the late-career and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda and most recently Neruda’s first volume, Book of Twilight a finalist for the 2018 Northern California Book Award in Translation. The author of four chapbooks of poems, he published his first full-length volume of poems, The New Gods, with Beltway Editions in September 2022. In March 2023, the Los Angeles Master Chorale included three poems from The New Gods and one from his chapbook, Waterways, in the world premiere of Reena Esmail’s “Malhaar: A Requiem for Water,” at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and Quill Award finalist in poetry, he received the American Literary Award from the bilingual Korean American journal Miju Poetry and Poetics in September 2021. A co-founder of Copper Canyon Press and an educator, O’Daly has received national and regional honors for literary editing and instructional design. Currently, he is Lead Writer for the California Water Plan, the state’s strategic plan for sustainably and equitably managing water resources.