Finally Comes the Poet: Maxine Kumin

Poetry shouldn't finally have to come to this, though the Old Testament prophets, the chronicler of the Bhagavad Gita, the Psalmists, all form a line as long as the parade of saints who have lost their lives to violence and who, when they finally come singing, sing a song we had best listen to at last. It was Walter Brueggemann, among others, who argued (in Finally Comes the Poet), that the voices that best bring us to attention to the issues of the day may be the poets. Occasionally allow me to lift up a poem which will direct you to the poets and their most recent book of poems. Have you noticed how, with increasing frequency, poets are singing such alarms?

"Please Pay Attention as the Ethics Have Changed"
- tag line, New Yorker Cartoon, May 10, 2004

Four hundred and seventeen pen-raised pheasants/were rattled -- think stick

on a picket fence -- into flight/for the Vice President's gun. And after that

hundreds of pen-reared mallards/ were whooshed

up to be killed/by; among others, a Supreme Court Justice.

Statistics provided by HSUS -- /the Humane Society of the United States.

The exact number of ducks, however, is wanting--/ this is canned hunting

where you don't stay to pluck/the feathers, pull the innards out. Fuck

all of that. You don't do shit/except shoot.

But where is that other Humane Society, the one with rules/ we used to read aloud in school

the one that takes away your license to collar/ and leasd a naked prisoner

the one that forbids you to sodomize/ a detainee before the cold eyes

of your fellow MPs?/ When the pixie soldier says cheese

for the camera who says please pay attention?/ The ethics have changed.

Fuck the Geneva Convention.

- Maxine Kumin, Still To Mow, W.W. Norton & Company, NY 2007