A few months ago, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art film series featured Peter Davis’s seminal Viet Nam war documentary Hearts and Minds (1974), we were inspired to look for contemporary reviews. Penelope Gilliatt’s column in The New Yorker is as pertinent in our day, in the context of our wars, as it was in 1975.
NORMAL
for Shara McCallum
walk long enough
with a pebble in your shoe
and walking with a pebble becomes
normal
you no longer notice
the discomfort the limp is just
another thing to live with
pain just another fact of life
until someone you haven’t seen for a time
asks Why are you limping
and you remember
Oh yes, that’s right –
I have a pebble in my shoe
and then what do you do
take it out leave it in because
you are used to its dull and constant ache
do not want to learn how to walk properly again
live long enough
with war
and it becomes
normal
men and women you don’t know –
someone else’s children –
fly off the edges of the map
to places you were never taught existed
photos of the dead close out
nightly news programs a familiar tag-
line as the anchor signs off
until tomorrow
images of troops march across
a strange topography the sound of guns
going off in places so distant
you hardly notice one barely hears a noise
until someone says
We’ve been at war my entire adult life
and you remember
Oh, yes, that’s right –
there IS a war still going on
And then what do you do?
– Reginald Harris
Used by permission.
Poetry in the Branches Coordinator for Poets House in New York City, Reginald Harris was a Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the ForeWord Book of the Year for 10 Tongues: Poems (2001). A Pushcart Prize Nominee and recipient of Individual Artist Awards for both poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council, his work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and other publications. Contributor toLGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia (2008), he is currently pretending to work on two manuscripts.
10YAC is proud to present “If I Had a Trillion Dollars”, a youth video project sponsored by American Friends Service Committee and National Priorities Project. Last year’s participants were asked to create videos responding to the rising costs of war, which by May 30th, 2010 had reached more than $1,000,000,000,000. AFSC and NPP are hosting the competition again this year, encouraging more young people to consider the trillions of dollars our federal budget gives to military funding.
Watch the video made by the third-prize winners from 2010—young filmmakers from The Village of Arts and Humanities, a community arts organization in Philadelphia:
For the Fifty (Who Formed PEACE With Their Bodies)
In the green beginning,
in the morning mist,
they emerge from their chrysalis
of clothes: peel off purses & cells,
slacks & Gap sweats, turtle-
necks & tanks, Tommy’s & Salvation
Army, platforms & clogs,
abandoning bras and lingerie, labels
& names, courtesies & shames,
the emperor’s rhetoric of defense,
laying it down, their child-
stretched or still-taut flesh
giddy in sudden proximity,
onto the cold earth: bodies fetal or supine,
as if come-hithering
or dead, wriggle on the grass to form
the shape of a word yet to come, almost
embarrassing to name: a word
thicker, heavier than the rolled rags
of their bodies seen from a cockpit:
they touch to make
the word they want to become:
it’s difficult to get the news
from our bodies, yet people die each day
for lack of what is found there:
here: the fifty hold, & still
to become a testament, a will,
embody something outside
themselves & themselves: the body,
the dreaming disarmed body.
-Philip Metres
Used by permission.
Philip Metres is the author of numerous books, including To See the Earth (poetry, 2008),Come Together: Imagine Peace (anthology of peace poems, 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (criticism, 2007). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Were it not for Ellis Island, his last name would be Abourjaili.
A note from David Sipress: “This cartoon popped into my head after we started bombing in Libya. I already was feeling completely fed up and overwhelmed by two useless, terrible wars, and the news from Libya seemed to push things to the point of total absurdity.”
David Sipress is a staff cartoonist at The New Yorker. He has published more than 450 cartoons in the magazine. His work has been published in many other magazines and newspapers, including Time, Parade, Funny Times, Utne, and Shambhala Sun. He has illustrated numerous books and has authored eight cartoon collections. David is also a fiction writer. He lives in Brooklyn.
The Day Obama Decided
The day Obama decided enough was enough
and turned off his TV and slept well for the first time since 2007,
and Nancy Pelosi decided enough was enough
on a weekend in Vermont, when she threw
the Times and the Post into the woodstove unread,
and Congress decided enough was enough
staring into the mirrors of their sleeping consciences:
They began by ordering all the troops home.
You should have seen the parades.
They marched past boarded-over buildings
and threw grenades
made from tulip bulbs and tomato seeds
into weedy empty lots.
They pulled trailers down the highways
past the cornfields
and wheeled hot tubs up to the doors
of arthritic old ladies,
presented bottles full of bubble bath
stamped “Courtesy of U.S. D.O.D.”
They rode ferris wheels with teenagers from Guantanamo,
passed baklava, pupusas, and mangoes on sticks
down the streets to anyone who wanted them.
Then they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue.
The doors of the White House were flung wide open.
Anyone who wanted to could stream in
for a handshake and a plastic flag.
The air was thick with confetti
from all the shredded fear laws.
Open your mouth: You can still
taste the jagged edges.
“SB1070” and “USA PATRI”
melt away on your tongue.
-Margit Berman
Used by permission.
Margit Berman is a writer, activist, psychologist, and faculty at Dartmouth Medical School. These days she’s fasting for a morally just budget, meta-analyzing Big Pharma, organizing a Park(ing) Day event in Minneapolis in September 2011, and blogging about body image and size acceptance. Berman is published in If Poetry Magazine and has won awards at the Poetry-Free-For-All and Garrison Keillor’s Green Light at the End of the Dock Festival of Romantic Poetry.
Suheir Hammad, poet, author and political activist, performs two spoken word pieces: “What I Will” and “break (clustered)”.
TEDwomen, December 2010.
10 Years + Counting is proud to be collaborating with Split This Rock to present a series of featured contemporary poems that speak to the culture, crisis, and conscience of war.
Split This Rock, based in Washington D.C., is a national network of socially engaged poets. Through events including a biannual festival – the third to be held March 22-25, 2012 – Split This Rock works to explore and debate the public role of the poet and the poem in this time of crisis.
See Them Coming
Here come the octopi of war
tentacles wielding guns, missiles
holy books and colorful flags.
Don’t fill your pens with their ink.
Write with your fingernails, scratch
light upon these darkened days.
-Sholeh Wolpé
From The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press 2004). Used by permission.
Sholeh Wolpé is the author of Rooftops of Tehran, The Scar Saloon, and Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad for which she was awarded the Lois Roth Translation Prize in 2010. She is the associate editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East (Norton), the guest editor of Atlanta Review (2010 Iran issue) and the poetry editor of the Levantine Review, an online journal about the Middle East. Sholeh is also the editor of Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles (MSU, 2012). Born in Iran, she presently lives in Los Angeles.
Welcome to the 10 Years + Counting blog. This space is a container for impressions of war. These impressions won’t always comment explicitly on the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They will always speak to the costs of those wars by evoking the overwhelming human, economic, spiritual waste all wars leave in their wake. They will come from poetry, history, cinema, literature, and more. Wake up and attend to the waste, they will tell us. Stay awake and bring the war, the waste to an end.
The New York Times of June 11, 2011, on the occasion of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ final policy speech before leaving office, reported a senior NATO official as saying, “If the United States did not have large stockpiles of ammunition…the NATO campaign [in Afghanistan] would already have come to a halt. The Americans are selling the ammunition, but it was the American military budget that paid for its manufacture and stockpiling.”
This brought to mind the farewell speech of Dwight D. Eisenhower, delivered in 1961. It is a speech well-known for the president’s coinage of the term “military-industrial complex.” Especially, eerily, in our current moment, the context of that term, Eisenhower’s entire speech, warrants revisiting:
The speech:
http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/speeches/19610117%20farewell%20address.htm
The video:
10 YEARS + COUNTING 