By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan
A poem asks the reader to participate in the making of its meaning, and in this way binds the reader to the writer, while leaving the reader free to bring her own mental associations to the poet’s words and images. Thus, the poem combines a private and a public language in a process of communication. While poetry “makes nothing happen” (as Auden stated in his famous eulogy for Yeats), it can lift the veil from deeply disturbing aspects of our collective lives and in so doing ask us to rethink those troubling realties, which we often prefer to ignore, so long as we feel comfortably secure in our own personal lives. By engaging individual imaginations, poetry has the power to bridge the boundaries and divisions that keep us apart. This is not to say that poetry can improve the world on a scale that would empower the many millions of disadvantaged, mistreated, and politically invisible human beings. But it can help the rest of us to see that these people exist, and that their sufferings are real, and that we could make efforts in the real world to ameliorate the condition of their lives.
the wind picks up
a campaign poster
the hair just right
executive abusio
the warped rule
of blind mouths
wondering which way to turn the nut in charge
a caterpillar
crawls across the evening news
that orange hair
the king of clubs
trumped —
he throws his toys out of the playpen
politics
the ambidextrousness
of a dead bird
day laborer
climbing a ladder
out of the basement
pencil stub
wrinkled fingers pinch
another penny
a cold wind
haggles with golden leaves
savings and loan
a fork
in the road
nothing to eat
the cat lady’s eye
strays
each with its own name
a beggar sings
over a coffee tin
nickels counting time
no newspaper coverage
the homeless man
asleep on a bench
a homeless woman
sips from a birdbath
wrinkles in a rainbow
skin
brown and bruised –
the fruit within decays
road sign
rust
in the bullet holes
Peshawar
apples stacked neatly
as the guns
constant drizzle
a faded flag hangs heavy
over another war
fallen
into fallen leaves
toy soldier
crow’s feet
around the eyes
sunset on the battlefield
demilitarized zone
the space between
jugglers
the banker’s heart as capacious as an open-pit mine
nativity scene
behind an iron gate
the wise men long gone
tree by the wall
a solitary poem
in a life sentence
muddy field
a child in rags
sings to his buffalo