#02 / 2003 Peace Tour, Austin poetry & "This Country is Killing Me"

 THIS COUNTRY IS KILLING ME
#02

A LIVE FOR ART column by Beatlick Pamela Hirst

In his latest book "Kingdom of Fear," Hunter S. Thompson says a president has the responsibility to bring good to the people, not harm. At least Clinton never harmed anyone but himself. 

We are living in a country that will impeach a president for a sexual peccadillo in the White House, yet the same people endorse, indeed praise, a president who is destroying the environment, robbing the poor to pay the rich, and systematically removing our civil liberties.

If you think the Patriot Act of 2001 was scary, wait until you find out what is in the Domestic Security Act of 2003, a new proposal secretly leaked out of the Justice Dept. and reported on by Bill Moyers recently. 

Congressman Dan Burton says, "An iron veil is descending over the executive branch of government." The expansion of the Patriot Act, which detained over 1,000 people without trial, expands the ability of the government to conduct surveillance, requires no oversight or accountability, and authorizes secret arrests.

It allows the Attorney General to strip Americans of their citizenship without trial if they even unwittingly contribute to a terrorist organization. The Attorney General can suppress information about toxic chemicals under the guise of national security. If there is a problem at a chemical plant, an accident, you’ll never know - it’s a matter of national security. The government can gain access to your credit data, your library selections, your medical records, and you will never know - it’s a matter of national security. Now, don’t you feel safer?

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Albert Einstein.

Today there is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. 

Martin Luther King, Jr.

In peace, there’s nothing so becomes a man. 

Shakespeare

Austin anti-war poems

THIS IS THE WAR THAT GEORGE FOUGHT

This is the land

where the war was fought that George fought.

This is the oil

that comes from the land that George fought.

This is the tractor

that runs on the oil

that comes from the land

where the war was fought

that George fought.

This is the farmer

that drives the tractor

that runs on the oil

that comes from the land

that George fought.

This is his son

that lies in the sand

and this is the oil

that burns on the land.

This is the war that George fought.

E. Russel Smith

Austin, TX

THE OLD BELIEVER

The Old Believer 

runs a Christian bookstore in Palacios, Texas.

Inside a generous, old two-story Victorian.

verandas sweep across the framework

Top and bottom

His wife has multiple sclerosis

and for 23 years he's tended to family business upstairs

and God’s business downstairs.

Heaven and earth.

I greeted him with anti-war literature,

he me with a face mild and wide as the day’s landscape.

We square off.

"We don’t need to go to war," says I.

"But there is a great war coming," he says.

"I'm offering poems for peace," I say.

“The word is stronger than the sword,” he claims,

"Hebrew 4:12: 

For the word of God's stronger 

than any two-edged sword, 

piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, 

and of joints and marrow.

“He set a different philosophical tack

and the gray Texas clouds blew through his eyes

and peace flew out the window.

“The Prince of Peace will return a warrior,” he warns me.

He takes his own warrior’s stance, ready to serve.

He had ignored my pleas for peace, yet,

he still endorsed me.

THE WORD IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

by Beatlick Pamela Hirst

THE LADY WHO EATS SNOW

There is a lovely lady in Texas

who eats snow in her dreams

writes about young wolves

and the order of the hunt

During the long dark winter

the lady who eats snow

grows larger and nearer to herself

The ice of the river is in her glass

she is two margueritas short of a howl

Soon she will dream of Alpha wolves

and water

by Neil Meili

Austin Texas

JUST A LITTLE BULLET

Just a little bullet, just a little bullet

Waiting for a trigger and a finger that will pull it

Just a little bullet out to make its way

Just a little bullet on a holiday

It started as a rock on the edge of a cliff

They extracted the lead on the graveyard shift

Melted and molded so round and smooth

Stuffed inside a shellcase factory-approved

Sold in a gunstore in New Orleans

Displayed in the window like jelly beans

Purchased by a man who bought out the store

And put it on a freighter to a foreign shore

Carried in a pocket like a pack of cigarettes

Somewhere on the border where a trap is set

Placed down a barrel, the first in the clip

Shot through a pistol like the crack of a whip

Straight through a t-shirt, straight through a chest

Bursting through a heart, leaving quite a mess

Straight through a backbone out the other side

Leaving someone dead who just had been alive

Just a little bullet, just a little bullet

Waiting for a trigger and a finger that will pull it.

by Tom Pacheco

Woodstock, NY

REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME

“Like shooting fish in a barrel, man,

it was like shooting fish in a barrel!”

The barrel has no water in it;

the fish lie stacked on their sides

like silver playing cards,

gills gasping frantically,
mouths opening and closing

in silent screams.

The pupils of their round lidless eyes

reflect flashes of light

as their bodies jump and twitch

beneath the hail of bullets,

their flesh splitting to release pale blood.

The barrel holds no water...but somewhere in its depths

there is the dark, indescent sheen

of oil.

Sue Littleton
 MUJER MAIZE

 Austin, TX