N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 3 : S p e c i a l E d i t i o n

L o n g P o e m M a s t e r p i e c e s o f t h e P o s t b e a t s

JEFF PONIEWAZ

September 11, 2001

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god....

Blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man....

They stare...Imperialism's face

And the international wrong.

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie,...

The lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky...

Hunger allows no choice:

We must love one another or die.

—from "September 1, 1939"

by W.H. Auden

I praise the firemen: truly as heroic as the antique gods,

as Whitman said. Medics, too: divine messengers of mercy

indeed. And I go to each and every one killed or wounded

by terrorism as tenderly as "The Wound-Dresser"

made his rounds in Whitman's Civil War poem,

as devoutly as the firemen's beloved chaplain

who was hit in the head and killed by falling debris

while administering the Last Sacrament

to victims fallen to the sidewalk at the foot of

the doomed skyscrapers. I think of all the victims

and their loved ones with immense compassion

and also mourn the two ancient giant standing

Buddhas of Compassion destroyed by Taliban artillery

in Afghanistan six months before the twin Towers

were destroyed in Manhattan—destroyed ungently,

unlike Tibetan sand paintings scattered by their artists

as a meditation on the ephemerality of art and life.

That being said, I say the following:

Chicken Little said "The sky is falling,"

but on 9-11 the skyscrapers were falling:

a million tons of steel and glass rained down.

Environmentalists had been called Chicken Littles

for sounding alarm over a hole in the sky over Antarctica

and Greenhouse gases heating up the planet's atmosphere.

Weren't those skyscrapers doing to the Biosphere

what those terrorists did to those skyscrapers?

But Greenpeace hangs banners from buildings;

it does not blow them up. If only the terrorists

had just hung a banner from one of the World Trade towers:

"GIVE PALESTINE BACK

TO THE PALESTINIANS!"

and another banner from the other tower:

"HALF MILLION IRAQI CHILDREN

KILLED BY U.S.-LED SANCTIONS!"

This poem is the banner I hang in the air

above the still-smoldering skyscraper ruins

and from every skyscraper on the planet still standing.

A nonstop convoy of dumptrucks took

the obliterated remains of those twin skyscrapers

to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Staten Island

where Antler & I read with Allen Ginsberg in April '90

and afterwards took a tour of that stench-exuding

New York City dump. Allen died 4 1/2 years ago

with the arch-example of the "endless Jehovahs" in "Howl"

visible in the distance. Yes, the Empire State Building

was visible from his deathbed window. His 1974 poem

"Jaweh and Allah Battle" is still so timely, right on the button

of the Cain&Abel/Isaac&Ishmael history of the Middle East

and of the human species in general into the mists of time,

the grotesque penchant for humansacrifice to Moloch.

If only Allen were still alive to help us figure out this ongoing Planet News

scoop he had such a bead on for decades: i.e. what on Earth is going on

on Earth? He saw right through all national/international chicanery.

His 1965 poem "Who Be Kind To" invoked that 2001 would be

"the year of thrilling god," not the year when deranged Philistine Davids

sling jetliners into skyscrapers that "stand in the long streets like endless

Jehovahs" &/or Allahs. His "Jaweh and Allah Battle" lays bare

the "High Noon" showdown folly involved when two "Chosen People"s

are squeezed into the same tiny Holy Land and when one claims they're

the legitimate children of their mutual ancestral patriarchal bigdaddy

and claims the other are un-chosen people, mere bastards

of that bigdaddy. Not a situation conducive to cordial vibrations.

Pity the poor innocent people diving into the cool air

from the inferno forcing them out the windows.

Pity the poor innocent humans burned by a hell

created in the human brain. Pity the poor affluent

innocent humans burned alive and crushed like flies

between the layers of the arch-cathedral of Commerce.

Pity the poor innocent know-not-what-they-do people

caught in the inexorable karma of the god of Gasoline

enshrined and worshipped in the temple of wailing Wall Street.

Pity the poor innocent people trapped and doomed in the

larger-than-its-father progeny of the Imperialism State Building

up which the Natural World climbed with humanity in its fist

while U.S. Air Force planes tried to shoot it down

causing the Natural World to plummet to the pavement

—the Gorilla species close to extinction a mere half century

after the RKO plane circled the planet before

the opening credits of King Kong.

Pity the poor humans trapped and doomed inside the twin progeny

of the Empire State Building that soon overtower'd

the Chrysler Building that Lorca cried out from the peak of

decrying Rockefeller's poisoning of the Hudson River.

Pity the innocent bystander minions of Rockefeller crashing

an oil-laden Exxon-Valdez into pristine Alaskan shores.

Pity the poor commuters sardined into the twin Molochs

that punctured a hole in the ozone layer and was planning to crash

a half billion two-car garages through the Great Wall of China.

Pity those innocent accomplices aboard those skyscrapers

rammed into the sky sabotaging the atmosphere for the entire planet.

Pity the poor realityTV hostages cowering in front of their televisions—

their favorite commercial-riddled soap-operas/sitcoms/gameshows

pre-empted by the bad news not everyone buys Madison Avenue—

cowering in front of televisions where this terrorism gets reported

but not the terrorism of Global Economic Godzilla.

Pity the poor people who died for Rockefeller's sins.

Pity the poor people who died for Hitler's sins

that caused a Zionist state to be imposed on Palestine.

Pity the souls who were snuffed because Commerce rules

rather than an interfaith ecumenical spirituality to foster

compassionate harmony among all the peoples of the planet.

Pity the poor humans trapped and doomed inside the karmic

bull's-eye of the nature-blind cyclops on U.S. Dollar.

Pity the poor children seeing this on their TV screens

even more violently psychologically indelible than

the exploding Space Shuttle. This explosion hit home

more than all the explosions in movies—more than

the White House blown up in Independence Day.

This Pearl Harbor struck at the end of the summer

Hollywood launched a movie version of Pearl Harbor.

Just like FDR knew it would take something like a Pearl Harbor

to get the U.S. into World War II,

so Bush Jr. & Sr. & Cheney knew it would take something

like terrorists blowing up a skyscraper

to get America into World War III—

to get Congress to divert money and attention from environment,

education, and every other urgent priority

to Star Wars missile shield and every other futile stop-gap measure

to protect America from the karma of T.R.'s "Big Stick Policy."

A mere half century before T.R. waved his pre-nuclear Big Stick

at the rest of the world,

Whitman imparted a planet-embracing blessing from America

to the world:

I salute all the inhabitants of the earth...

Good will to you all, from me and America sent!

Toward you all, in America's name,

I give the sign of democracy.

My spirit has pass'd in compassion around the whole earth....

I have taken my stand on the tips of peninsulas

and on the peaks of high embedded rocks

to cry: Salut au monde!

How could he suspect the Long Island along whose shore

he heard and observed mockingbirds as a boy

and from whose eastern tip he beamed

his "Salut au Monde" blessing as a man

would a century and a half later be

an overdeveloped Manhattan suburb more famous

as the place where Joey Buttafuoco's jailbait girlfriend

shot his wife in the head?

Damn the terrorists for provoking a run on flags,

for making the flag factories work overtime,

for reintroducing the bill to ban flag-burning,

for making Winston Smith love Big Brother even more,

for increasing likelihood Bush will be re-elected in 2004

(like hostage-taking terrorists in '79 knocked

Carter out of the White House and put Reagan in),

for making Bush a big hero for no other reason than

he's our country-right-or-wrong's Commander in Chief,

for unifying the country around the Son of Desert Storm,

for intensifying the threat the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge

will be drilled, every last drop of oil be squeezed out of the earth

and burned, rather than accelerate transition to non-fossil fuels,

for putting Global Warming on the back burner,

for putting the Rainforest Holocaust on the back burner,

for putting the whole spectrum of the Environmental Crisis

on an even more remote back burner,

for distracting attention from Population Bomb terrorism

fomented by Vatican rather than Taliban,

for riling up chauvinism in America despite Ferlinghetti's

1958 warning that nationalism is "the idiotic superstition

that would blow up the world."

Damn the terrorists for following the example set by U.S.A.

at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The first "skyscraper" was only 130 ft. high,

built on Manhattan in 1870 when land began running out on the island

the Dutch bought from the Indians for a mess of glass beads.

The Woolworth Building babel'd 60 stories heavenward in 1913.

The Chrysler Building 77 stories in 1930, from the top of which Lorca

shouted out his warning about planet-raping skyscrapers

just before the Empire State Building was built:

Now there's no one to mourn the wounds of elephants.

There are only millions of blacksmiths

forging chains for the children to come,

There is only a mob of laments

unbuttoning their shirts in hope of the bullet

and dark nymphs of pestilence scream.

—the Jesus Chrysler Building that crucified the Biosphere,

from the top of which Federico Garcia Lorca wept

over the New Jerusalem and the New Golgotha,

and wept over the New Roman Empire's gunboat diplomacy,

and wept over the Hudson River "drunk on oil" vomiting into the bay

above Staten Island where New York would come to accumulate

one of the largest/foulest mountains of stench-exuding garbage

in the world, to which the debris of the World Trade Center

would be trucked 70 years after Lorca wept over the New Rome

from the top of the Chrysler Building:

I denounce the people

that lifts its cement mounds

where the hearts of animals beat,

where we'll all tumble down

in the final merrymaking....

I denounce the conspiracy

of these office buildings

that don't broadcast agonies

and that erase the jungles.

If still alive, wouldn't Lorca denounce skyscrapers that don't broadcast

agonies of a half million Iraqi children UNICEF says were killed

by U.S.-led sanctions, or the fact the lush rainforests

crucial to the continuation of life on Earth have been vanishing

a footballfield per second since the 1980s?

A mere year after the Chrysler Building,

the Empire State Building, 102 stories,

was completed in 1931 and, soon after, King Kong,

symbolizing what's left of the Natural World

in the form of a giant ape, climbed to the top

while Air Force planes, foreboding an upcoming

Massacre of Endangered Species, shot him down

and he dropped to the street in the movie that came out

68 years before people were jumping off the top

of the World Trade Center, not because as in 1929 the Stock Market crashed,

but because America's oil-driven foreign policy crashed

into the precariously tall temples it built to its god of Commerce,

because the bombardment of Baghdad launched by Bush Sr.

returned like a radar-proof boomerang to haunt Bush Jr.

The oil-driven war against the Earth known as the Industrial Revolution

crashed into the Ozone Layer that protects the Earth from the Sun,

and the karma of America's getting drunk on oil for over a century

crashed into skyscrapers like a drunken-driver into World History.

What if Black Elk in his old age, instead of converting heartbroken

to Catholicism and waiting heartbroken on the reservation

for John Neihardt to write down his heartbreaking story,

what if, instead of weeping on Mt. Harney, Black Elk had taken

flying lessons from Orville Wright and what if he had tried to fly

a biplane into the Empire State Building soon after it was completed

in 1931, to protest the U.S. Calvary's genocide of the Indians

and Buffalo Bill's genocide of the buffalo to make the world safe

for McDonald's? But, as the movie King Kong showed,

biplanes are indeed mere mosquitos to skyscrapers.

On a foggy Saturday in 1945, a B-52 headed for Newark

crashed into the Catholic War Relief Services offices

on the 79th floor, killing the pilot and thirteen others.

Despite fire damage and a gaping 20-foot hole,

the building was open for business on Monday morning.

And what if Black Elk had—heavenforbid!—flown a biplane

into the Chrysler Bldg while Lorca was proclaiming therefrom?

And what if—what if!—Allen Ginsberg had not died in 1997

and had been on the roof of Tower One making a musicvideo

titled "Half Million Iraqi Children, Three Million Congolese"

to the tune of his "September on Jessore Road"

with Dylan, McCartney, Sting, Springsteen, Bono

and Willie Nelson when the jet crashed

minutes after Allen et al had coffee served by the guy

everyone liked whose day job was breakfast cook

in the Windows on the World restaurant on the top floor,

a sweeter guy you could never meet,

played stand-up bass in a folkrock group.

Damn the terrorists, and by "damn" I don't mean

"damn to eternal torment in some bottomless pit of a hell"

such as Muslim and Christian fundamentalists mean by "damn."

But rather I mean "damn" as in "Goldarn those misguided fools."

Damn the Crusades and Hitler for inspiring Christendom and Israel

to inspire Muslim fundamentalists to crash airliners full of people

into skyscrapers, turning them into highrise Auschwitzes!

Damn the terrorists for unleashing a tidal wave of flag-waving!

At least this newfound ecumenical interfaith openness

motivated by an intercreed need for unity against terrorism

is preferable to, say, the condemnation of homosexuals

common to Jewish, Muslim and Christian fundamentalism.

More people killed in America by handguns

since John Lennon was killed by a handgun

than died in the Vietnam War.

More U.S. Vietnam War vets have committed suicide

since the end of the Vietnam War

than U.S. soldiers were killed during the Vietnam War.

America, it seems, is its own worst terrorist.

Yet the headlines screamed "Terrorism Strikes U.S.!", not:

"U.S. Foreign Policy Boomerangs into World Trade Center

U.S. Military Policy Boomerangs into Pentagon."

In October '67 Ed Sanders tried to levitate the Pentagon

with levity, not with explosives or an airliner full of jetfuel.

Yes, Ed and an army of hippies surrounded the Pentagon

like the ghosts of Ghost Dance past, except they wore peace-paint

rather than warpaint, and attempted to levitate the Pentagon

with Allen Ginsberg's "Pentagon Exorcism"

and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. A flower child

daintily stuck a flower's stem down one of the rifle barrels

pointed by the ring of soldiers poised between the

five-sided symbol of war and the flower-arm'd hippies.

Contrast that gentle image of potent flowerpower

to hijackers crashing an airliner into the Pentagon 34 years later

like Slim Pickens riding an A-Bomb in Dr. Strangelove.

I burn the flag whose foreign policy accompliced

the obliteration of two skyscrapers full of thousands of people.

I burn the flag that tries to enforce the Manifest Destiny

of the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" American Dream.

I burn the flag that stole an election

from the man who wrote Earth in the Balance

and gave it to the Son of Desert Storm,

the Oil Industry's candidate.

I burn the flag that supported rightwing dictators

from Franco who killed Lorca

to Pinochet who killed Neruda.

I salute the flag that influences an end to global eco-cide,

that promotes a World Eco, and not just Trade, Organization.

I salute the flag that promotes Salut au Monde world peace!

I deplore anti-American terrorism as much as Dan Rather,

but I deplore pro-American terrorism too: selfish self-centered

"national interest" (i.e. "corporate interest") pro-Americanism.

What about the terrorists who were trained at the U.S.-run

school for terrorists under the patriotic-sounding name

"School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Georgia?

What about the U.S. (under Reagan) being the only country

ever condemned for international terrorism by the World Court

(in 1986) and then vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution

calling on all countries to adhere to international law?

What about the Contra terrorists covertly financed by Reagan

via Col. Ollie North: Arms for Drugs a.k.a. Iran-Contra-gate?

What about the U.S. terrorism against Nicaragua secretly financed

by sales of crack cocaine in America's inner cities in the 1980s?

And what about the CIA fomenting the military coup that on 9/11

in '73 overthrew democratically elected Salvador Allende,

resulting in his death, the deaths of thousands in Santiago

soccer stadium, the chopping off of Victor Jara's hands

and the heartbroken death of Whitman's grandson Pablo Neruda?

What about the terrorism of America dropping napalm on civilians

and Agent Orange’s longterm eco-cide against Vietnam?

And what about a "plan approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff

in 1962 to commit acts of terrorism in the U.S. and blame Cuba

to create a pretext for an invasion," as revealed in James Bamford's

Body of Secrets NSA exposé published five months before Sept. 11?

And what about the terrorism of Manhattan Project scientists

who systematically injected thousands of unsuspecting Americans

with plutonium since 1945 to test the effects of radiation on humans,

as exposéd in The Plutonium Files by Eileen Welsome?

And what about the "Stern Gang Irgun" Zionist terrorist group

Allen Ginsberg referred to in his "Jaweh and Allah Battle"?

And what about the environmental terrorists who are throwing

monkeywrenches into the life-support systems of Spaceship Earth

and the FBI doesn't go after them like they go after Earth First!?

What about the human madhouse crashing into the edifice

of Evolution?—isn't thousands of species going extinct worse

than three thousand individuals of one overpopulous species?

Pity the poor Arawak Indians and their Caribbean ecosystem

decimated when Columbus crashed the Nina,

Pinta and Santa Maria into Hispaniola.

Wasn't Spanish Inquisition Spain a terrorist that crashed

a Trojan Horse full of conquistadors into the Western Hemisphere?

Wasn't religious intolerance a terrorist that crashed a Mayflower

full of witch-hunters into Plymouth Rock?

Wasn't Ellis Island the American Dream Fantasy Island

that forced the Indians to occupy Alcatraz?

Oct. 16 ABC News reports the first bioterrorism attack in America

took place in 1763 during the French and Indian Wars

when the British gave the Indians blankets infected with smallpox.

So, America’s chief ally in the War Against Terrorism

committed the earliest bioterrorism in the Western Hemisphere!

Damn the U.S. terrorists who pretend to promote peace

while being the world's biggest arms merchant.

Damn the U.S. terrorists who dropped

two million tons of cluster bombs on Laos,

some of which continue to kill or maim children

who discover ones that waited decades to explode.

Damn the U.S. terrorists who rejected as inconvenient

the Kyoto treaty to stop Global Warming signed

by 165 nations two months after September 11.

Damn the greed-head traitors who sold out

whatever environmental moral authority

America might have had as result of

Thoreau-Muir-Leopold-Carson-Snyder

to steer Spaceship Earth clear of Eco-Apocalypse.

Damn the traitors who threw monkeywrenches

big as skyscrapers into the life-support systems

of Spaceship Earth despite Buckminster Fuller.

Damn the greed-blinded traitors who steered

the urban-industrial juggernaut fullspeed-ahead

into the exquisite beauty of Nature's intricacy.

Damn the traitors who betrayed America's promise.

People who live in glass skyscrapers

shouldn't hurl jetfuel fireballs into the sky

—even if the jetfuel is exploded gradually over the breadth

of the entire continent rather than in a splitsecond

into the face of the temple of the god of Oil & Money.

How many fireballs dramatic as the inferno'd Trade Center

are exploded daily into the atmosphere to hasten

an Eco-Apocalypse that could ultimately cause more suicides

than jumped from those twin pinnacles of human hubris?

Icarus falling with wings of flame from the 110th story.

Lovers jump holding hands as mythic as Paolo

and Francesca da Rimini in Dante's Inferno.

There are a million stories in the Naked City—

3000 of them have just had a horrific ending.

People who live in flammable houses

shouldn't drive tankfuls of an explosive

they complain if its price approaches

the price of Bovine Growth milk they buy

for their children. How dare the Powers That Be

charge as much to poison the lungs of our children

as we pay to put milk in their Sugar Frosted Flakes!

Meanwhile Tony the Tiger is devoured alive

by the merciless overpopulation of Asia

and America put a Tiger in its Tank

so it could put a tiger in every zoo

in every major city and fuel

carloads of humans to gawk at them.

People who want peace shouldn't drill

oilwells in Holy Lands so the God of War

and the God of Religious Fanaticism can turn them

into cyclones of soot for the whole planet to breathe.

The FAA wants the airlines to strengthen cockpit doors

to prevent them being broken through by terrorists.

But what about the terrorists who hijack Spaceship Earth,

who break into the cockpit of Spaceship Earth

and monkeywrench its life-support systems?

Those who monkeywrench the planet's life-support systems

are the terrorists to keep an eye on,

not the Earth First! Monkeywrench Gang.

Skyscrapers roughly shaped like Rockefeller's first oilwells,

Skyscrapers that are missiles as truly as nuclear missiles,

Skyscrapers that are missiles no Star Wars shield can

protect us from. Skyscrapers we climbed like Jack's beanstalk

to strangle the golden goose that sustains the planet's banquet.

Temples of Moloch and Mammon, whose priests

tell us we must go to war and sacrifice our children

so we can go on worshipping an Economy whose health

is predicated on maximum consumerism rather than

on Thoreauvianly minimizing consumerism and work

in order to maximize a freedom more real than

the cliché "freedom" advertised by the Flag Industry.

Isn't it high time to modify the economy

such that mega-consumption is no longer used

as criterion for the health of the economy,

but rather the most minimal possible consumption?

Despite the surge of attention shifting to Terrorism,

isn't now the time to re-arrange our planetary priorities toward

the "Salut au Monde" blessings of democracy, sufficiency and peace

Walt beamed from tips of peninsulas and peaks of high embedded rocks?

It's no mere coincidence the Chrysler Building

and the Empire State Building resemble titanic hypodermic needles,

for skyscrapers inject junk into the sky, into the water, into the land.

"How long this Addict government support our oil-burner matter habit

shooting gasoline electric speed before Mankind's utter bust?"

wrote Allen Ginsberg in "Friday the Thirteenth" a month before

the first Earth Day. "When violence floods the State,

flowery land razed for robot proliferation,

who can prophesy Peace, or vow Futurity?"

That great eco-prophetic poem begins:

"Blasts rip Newspaper Gray Mannahatta's mid day Air Spires,

Robot airfields soulless Market electronic intelligence

business skyscraper streets empty soul'd exploding.

Sheer matter crackling, disintegrating back to the void,

Maya-cities blow up like Chinese firecrackers,

Samsara tears itself apart." So mused Allen Ginsberg

onboard a plane from New York to Chicago a couple years

before the Sears Tower and the World Trade Center were completed.

That poem ends: "I drag hairy meat loss thru blood-red sky

down thru cloud-floor to Chicago, sunset obliterate in black gas."

Reviewing Antler's Selected Poems in the Spring 2001

Chiron Review out of Vortex Kansas, Linda Lerner wrote:

What he's protesting is everything that sucks the joy out

of people, makes them corpses before they're legally dead—

protesting every inhuman act, however large or small, from

deadening factory work to concentration camp atrocities and wars.

He reminds the reader what it means to be fully alive, and to be

alive in the fullest sense is a person's only reason for existing.

A few months later, Linda Lerner appears on the frontpage of the

Sept. 21 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via a news service news item:

Everywhere were the painful imprints of last week's terrorist strike. The dust. And the lingering smell of death.

"I look at what happened, I smell the air, and it's like something that escaped from a lunatic's brain," said Linda Lerner, an English teacher and poet who lives near the World Trade Center along the Hudson River. "My neighborhood is still smoking."

She added: "It's too much of a close-

up. The smell was so awful, I kept

spraying Lysol. But nothing worked."

Cut to Phil Ochs singing "There But for Fortune"

before he hanged himself in 1976, depressed

by Victor Jara's chopped-off hands:

Show me the countries

where the bombs had to fall

Show me the ruins

where the buildings stood so tall....

Passage to India! Passage to the bomb bay of the Enola Gay!

Passage to a bullet through the brain of Gandhi!

Passage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

Passage to Korea and Vietnam!

Passage to Shangrila and Singapore!

Passage to highnoon nuclear showdown over Kashmir!

Passage to Pope Urban launching the first Crusade

in an attempt to force Muslims to surrender

to the worldwide urban sprawl of Vatican City.

Passage to Muslim fundamentalists playing into the hands

of Christian fundamentalists itching for Armageddon!

Passage to Cain & Abel and Isaac & Ishmael!

Passage to Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder in India in 1962.

Passage to George Harrison befriending Ravi Shankar in 1966.

Passage to Blake's "Tyger burning bright"

burning less and less bright in the forests of the night

while Hindus clog the sacred Ganges desecrated by pollution.

Passage to Dylan emerging from reclusion to help Bangladesh in '71.

Passage to 1984 coming true a few decades later than Orwell predicted?

In 1984 terrorism was fabricated as pretext for totalitarianism.

Passage to a Brave New World scarier than Aldous Huxley's:

humans manufactured artificially while endangered species

continue to be snuffed to make room for the Genesis-sanction'd

Manifest Destiny of human species overpopulation.

Passage to 2001—A Space Iliad, where there are two monoliths

instead of one, and rather than jump around in awe of them

the apes evolve so they can crash airliners into them.

King Kong meets Planet of the Apes

75 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial.

You Afghan in Afghanistan! You Israeli in Israel!

You Palestinian in what used to be called Palestine!

You American in America! You Brit in Britannia!

You Russian in what used to be called the Soviet Union!

You Aussie in Australia! You German in Allemande!

You French between the Channel and the Pyrenees!

You Italian at the tip of your boot-shaped peninsula!

You Hispanics from Spain to Hispaniola!

You Japanperson in the Land of the Rising Sun!

You Norwegian in the Land of the Midnight Sun!

You Indian in India and on U.S. reservations!

You Pakistani in Pakistan! You Bangladeshi in Bangladesh!

You South African taking your stand on the tip

of the Cape of Good Hope!

You South American taking your stand on the tip

of Tierra del Fuego!

You half million Iraqi children who died due to U.S.-led sanctions!

You Turk! You Kurd! You Indonesian! You East Timorese!

You Hottentot with clicking palate! You Hutus and Tutsis!

You Ugandan in Uganda, country the British originally

recommended as possible location for a Zionist homeland!

You Rwandan with machete bisecting Dian Fossey's brain!

You Brazilian gunning down rainforest advocate Chico Mendes

on his way to his outhouse!

You rainforest nations decimating rainforests that comprise

one of the vital life-support systems of the entire planet!

You Chinese strangling your rivers with dams to provide more

and more electricity for the still-expanding billion of China!

You filthy U.S. presidentiads that gave a rotten environmental example

to the other nations of the planet!

You bumsteer papal-bull papacies that promoted overpopulation

at the expense of future generations!

You filthy 1800s Indian-killer presidentiads that gave an example

of genocide to Germany humiliated by defeat in World War I!

You filthy presidentiads that betrayed Whitman's "Salut au Monde"

and "Democratic Vistas"!

Whitman took his stand on the tips of peninsulas

and on the peaks of high embedded rocks

to cry "Salut au Monde!" 75 years before Lorca

took his stand at the top of the Chrysler Building

at the southern tip of a peninsular island

called Manhattan,

and shouted out danger, shouted out warning—

shouted a warning to Guernica and Warsaw:

The Luftwaffe is coming!

The Luftwaffe is coming!

shouted a warning to Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

The Manhattan Project is coming!

and shouted out a warning to America and the World

about the Hudson River getting drunk on oil

40 years before a U.S. river caught fire

and 58 years before a million gallons of diesel fuel

went down the Monongahela.

Where is the hero who can transmute

this hellish fate into a heavenly destiny?

Joseph Campbell, pray for us! Huston Smith, pray for us!

Alan Watts, Meher Baba, Sufi Sam and Allen Ginsberg, pray for us!

Rumi, awaken us to our dervish planet spinning toward the brink!

Shalom Salaam! Salaam Shalom! "Peace!" in Aramaic

and Esperanto! "Peace!" in all the diverse languages going extinct

amid the "Buy! Buy! Buy!" lingua franca of the Madison Avenues

of the "limited time only" "going out of business" clearance sale

of planet-devouring Mega-consumerism!

Calling all avatars of compassion! Inspire pity on suffering humans

but also on the one-eyed lion and no-nose bear in the Kabul Zoo!

Oh let Rumi lead the dance to where

the Kaaba and the Kabbalah lie down together!

Oh let Rumi lead an army

of ecstatic pacifist dervishes

spinning like hejira gyroscopes,

spinning so fast all possibility of violence

is lost amid the need to maintain centered balance.

I take my stand on the tip of my tongue

and on the tip of my heightened brainlobes

to cry: Salut au World Peace!

Salut au World Joy!

Salut au Monde O Poets to Come,

annunciate with angelic tongue!

Salut au ever-expanding love of this

beautiful precious endangered planet!

Salut au Peace in every language

that ever evolved in the human skull!

Salaam Shalom! Shalom Salaam!

Shalom Salaam! Salaam Shalom!

AH! OM!

Sept.-Dec. 2001

Whitman	Ginsberg
Lorca	Rumi

[Used by permission of the author.]

Between 1989 and 2009 via UW-Milwaukee, Jeff Poniewaz taught "Literature of Ecological Vision," a course he devised to fill a gap in the Literature curriculum, and another course he devised called “Whitman & Ginsberg: Liberating American Bards.” His poems have appeared in many anthologies, and in numerous periodicals including Earth First!, Greenpeace Chronicles, Los Angeles Times, Blake Times, Exquisite Corpse, Viet Nam Generation, New York Quarterly and The Sun. His collection of eco-poems spanning 1975-82, Dolphin Leaping in the Milky Way (Inland Ocean Books, 1986), was praised by Allen Ginsberg for its "impassioned prescient ecological Whitmanesque/Thoreauvian verve and wit." Jeff won a 1987 "Discovery Award" from PEN, the international writers organization. Lawrence Ferlinghetti called Jeff’s epic “September 11, 2001” the “best poem I’ve seen on 9/11.” Jeff was chosen to be Milwaukee Poet Laureate 2013-15. A volume of his Selected Poems will be published in fall 2013.

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Jeff’s note on how his and Antler’s 9/11 poems came to be:

Soon after that horrific day, I told Antler “We should challenge each other to write a poem about it.” And that’s what we did. We didn’t show each other our poems while they were in progress. Only when we both felt our poems were ready did we read them to each other. Both poems turned out well but very different. Both wound up in two major 9/11 anthologies that came out in 2002: September 11, 2001—American Writers Respond (Etruscan Press, Silver Springs MD, William Heyen ed.) and An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind (Regent Press, San Francisco, Allen Cohen ed.). They both also appeared in Van Gogh’s Ear (Ian Ayres ed.) out of Paris in 2004. Antler’s poem also appeared in The Sun (Chapel Hill NC, Sy Safransky ed.) and the Jemez Thunder (Jemez Springs NM, Robert Borden ed.). An abridged version of my poem appeared in Free Verse (Linda Aschbrenner ed.) out of Wisconsin, and a couple cantos from it appeared in Big Scream (David Cope ed.) out of Michigan.