In a Time of War

By Rima Vesely

Because I can write at all – and I think of all the ways women especially have been prevented from writing – because my words are read and taken seriously, because I see my work as part of something larger than my own life or the history of literature, I feel a responsibility to keep searching for teachers who can help me widen and deepen the sources and examine the ego that speaks in my poems – not for political “correctness,” but for ignorance, solipsism, laziness, dishonesty, automatic writing. (Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet )

A young white woman points

at an Iraqi POW's genitals, cigarette

dangling from her mouth, slouching

if a child has just won a checkers game

and she is giving an energetic “good

job!”   “you did it!” the extroverted

symbolism of fraternity and paternalism

that accompanies great confidence.

But a black hood cloaks the naked

man's head and rows of other men

stand listless, grainy photo after grainy

photo displaying shocking horrors, images

of a Nazi concentration camp, graphic

proof of my country's fascism, and I

remain listless in my day to day, engrossed

with the search for teachers, turning to

stone as the days drag on, far from my

tradition, or any real way of speaking

(longing for silence, a clearing, not a void)

I am numb in my complicity, unable to

feel deeply even the most outrageous abuse: In

San Francisco, a black man shot by a white

cop, hands raised above his head, in retaliation

for a cop shooting by a parolee, reported gang

member, shouting. The pig's union demanding

death, retaliation at their fingertips, my  

brother shot in cold blood and I feel nothing,

numbness.   The young white soldier's slouch

at the edge of my mind   (“good job!”   “you did

it!”)   Where the fire has been drowned by water,

the mind wanders; the heart is now stone

It is only art that awakens me: the slow questing

pace of questions couched in firm and determined

language, a woman's language:   “I felt more and

urgently the dynamic between poetry as language

poetry as a kind of action, probing, burning,

stripping, placing itself in dialogue with others

out beyond the individual self.”   A refusal to

become stone, a commitment to become more

true to the self, in order to fight the revolutionary

wars, to stand and speak at the police commission's

hearings, to live beyond the exhaustion accompanying

the deadness of brandbuilding for the sake of a name;

immortalism an unworthy quest for what I am about,

call it snobbery or simply a rejection of politics

for the sake of money.   I want no part in it.

My soul feels dead, deepening shock in what is

happening by my complicit lifestyle, the deep

clench of anxiety ever in my gut, and I think of

moving, to a place where I once felt all the conflicts

and could take in the horrors of war with a raised

fist, clenched and determined, fed by a spirit of

resistance, fed by an inner life burning with

questions how and where, fed by community around

me, within me, speaking intensely, melting the stone

May 12, 2004

Rima L. Vesely is a poet and community activist based in Oakland, Calif. A Witness contributing editor, she is a coordinating committee member of the Black Radical Congress . Rima may be reached by email at nyicare@earthlink.net.