GRAFFITI: FIVE LENTEN POEMS

GRAFFITI: FIVE LENTEN POEMS

...No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice/...Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehoods/ Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still/...Our peace in His will/...And let my cry come unto Thee. ---T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

1.

That would have required a lot of fences,

a lot of denuded trunks, fallen trees even. 

You would have to stare at backyards

green with revived spring grass, risking 

life and limb. “Is this your graffiti? Is it?”

But the three words I stepped on, walking 

on the trail, in dotard cadence: Peace, Love:

they were temple bromides. But Voice? 

They were sprawled on the grime, like

drunken derelicts, one did not have to look 

but be accosted by their urgent demand

on winding asphalt: Peace. Love. Voice. 

Like four-letter words, they surprise one

whose habit is to look down in timorous 

gait, troubled by daily lust, greed, and lies

dreading mayhem from a gaze at the sky. 

2.

Peace. A span of walls for a five-letter word,

perhaps havoc among the mansion lords 

writhing in the spasm of murderous oath:

“Let me not catch the spineless vandal!  

Or heaven forbid, I will sever both his arms

from his bastard shoulders. No piece spared 

among his vile fingers. I will pluck his eyes

from their sockets. Paint “PEACE” with blood 

oozing from hollowed holes in his crushed

face, across his torso, down to his dirty groin!” 

I wonder at my walk’s anguish over the murder

of children, old women, and decrepit men 

in the hovels of Kandahar by a calculating

American Marine, Rambo-like, making a target 

practice out of frightened children, burning

their lean-to homes, maybe urinating, too, 

on corpses like those cut-up Taliban lined up

by YouTubed U.S. soldiers in nasty whoopee. 

Is this hurt, after all, not a misplaced dread

that peace is nothing now but a dying dream? 

3.

Love.  Like a four-letter word, it could not

have been used nor even abused in Homs 

where Syrian fathers, brothers, and armed

kin mowed down children, more children, 

dismembered children and all who could not

escape the carnage  at Karm el-Zeitoun to call 

down a leader beleaguered by an Arab Spring

blazing like fiery poems as flamethrowers. 

“Disarm the shabiba* or arm village defenders.

This is our civil war! “As if war could be civil. 

As if love were a filthy four-letter word thrown

at the askance who ask: How could you love 

your country when you butcher your lovers

and plead for arming your rebels to wage war? 

4.

Voice. Ah, the avant-garde call to general

quarters. From a challenging cry of rebellion, 

is it perhaps rapidly withering? Voice your pain.

Occupy! Voice your anger. Occupy! Vox populi 

Vox Dei. Occupy! Wall Street, Bay Street, or

even streetcars name Desire. Occupy! Occupy! 

From the stupor of a languid walk, one recalls

a Via Dolorosa, a lonely wounded walk up 

the Hill of Skulls, a golgotha presides over

a cacophony of voices, noises: Crucify! Crucify? 

Is this not, somehow, the direst of oxymorons

when the spread-eagled, nailed, pinioned man 

counsels love for neighbours? You will be with

me in paradise; forgive them, they know not 

what they do. Yet, did he not shout out his pain:

Father, why have you abandoned me? Why? 

The people must have their Voice. It is the Voice

of God. Soon, in the British Parliament, learned 

voices will argue why the Crucifix should not

be worn on stewardess’s lapels, or civil servants 

yearning for the equivalent of a tolerated turban,

or even a recondite dagger, all symbols of faith. 

5.

I step on these words graffitied on the sprung

trail. I mutter: Peace, Love, Voice. I did not fall. 

He did, got lashed, mocked. Kicked to stand

with his burden, he insisted on loving even 

enemies, even those who cried: Crucify Him!

On my quaint walk through a new spring on 

Glen Erin trail, I shrugged the lingering cold off

and whispered: Here is my empty heart. Occupy it. 

--ALBERT B. CASUGA

03-13-12

*Shabiba --- Government thugs