the tank drummer

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Susan L Daniels

Guitarists strum chords on guitars
& singers sing.  A pianist
floats fingered scales on her keyboard,
but what will we call this soldier

coaxing steel drum tones from a tank?
Guitarists strum chords on guitars
but this man is a war artist,
his palms can sound steel to anthems

on this tank, built for killing, but
now an instrument armed for peace.
Guitarists strum chords on guitars
but who is this soldier, singing

his hands are hammers, beating swords
into plowshares to till in peace,
and plays his piece easy, the way
guitarists strum chords on guitars.

***We are trying out quaterns at Dverse today.  However, this is a special poem, requiring several mentions of other WP blogs, as it was inspired by a video, which Terry at Mobius Faith reblogged and referenced a passage in Isaiah about beating swords into plowshares.  I already reblogged the video, but it is worth a second look, I think.  Here it is.

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apocalypse poem #6–the prophet

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Susan L Daniels

stained sneakers scuffing sidewalks
hands stuffed in the pocket of a torn pea-coat
Daniel in bluejeans screams sermons
into frozen air. red-bearded,
handknit cap hiding long curls,
he’s a latter-day prophet promising damnation,
God-ridden to rags & sticks, eyes lit
by bigger things than the sun;
reciting the end he has read
sprayed in graffiti
in that most ancient scrawl:

Me’ne, Me’ne, Te’kel,
Uphar’sin.

urgency we ignore as insanity
but Daniel knows something,
brain blasted clean  of all
but his message.  he reads it
written in constellations;
the voice of God in a book
echoed as loud as what’s roared
by the bear of the north sky–
that same prophecy
pulled by seven plowing oxen
shining brighter in their burn

than any brimstone

***the highlighted words have meaning assigned to them from the book of Daniel in the OT as:

Mene[e]: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.
27 Tekel[f]: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.
28 Peres[g]: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.

The old “handwriting on the wall.”

This is a reworking of an old, old poem I got the inspiration for before I had the maturity and teeth to write it the way it needed to be (around 1986).  You can read it here.

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Posted on December 5, 2012 by Susan L Daniels

he makes this instrument of war
sing, not of blood
but the clear tones of peace

Thanks, Mobius for leading me to this!

Dayyan Smith's avatarWorld Music - the Music Journey

This guy is improvising on an israeli battle tank.

“No more war. No more bloodshed.”

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thoughts while winding the grandfather clock

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Susan L Daniels

the motion
of a pendulum
is regular
and periodic
so much so
do I move
thought to thought
minute to minute
never fixed &
ticking down days
wound & occasionally
striking
the sound of time
being kept

but never held

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Apocalypse poem #5–the apocalypse survivor kit

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Susan L Daniels

Lu Zenghai is building an ark
to float his family safe through what he thinks
is another flood coming & we laugh,
the way they laughed at Noah
because he is millenia out of fashion
in survival techniques

in the ’50s, 60s & ’70s
bomb shelters were the fashion
of the passionately paranoid
while we children crawled under desks
in school, whispering below
the shriek of sirens
singing down bombs
that never struck

as if planes were the real threat

what protection would those desks offer
from warheads that were aimed
but never deployed
just stockpiled in a race
with no winners

no–there was no running from that
no matter how deep you dug
or how thick you poured
concrete walls

the survivalists appeared again
for the Y2K disaster
that never happened
but they kept their propane tanks
& tinned beef/just in case

& now people of similar preparedness
bordering on insanity have catalogs
& order apocalypse survival kits,
backpacks heavy with water purifiers
& jerky.  the best have bullets
(gun not included)
for hunting or protecting
what earth
remains soft enough to till
or build on

odd, if you think of it
with most everyone else dead
& the planet empty to choose space from
what would be left worth killing

or worth fighting over
to own?

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RIP–another Suli Breaks Spoken Word

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Susan L Daniels

This is really clever.

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Posted on December 4, 2012 by Susan L Daniels
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