For sensitive poets
We have this news:
Saddam is why God
Made B-52s

God
didn't
make
no
B52s
LiarLiar
Go
Tie
Your
Shoes

some people are still fighting World War 2
that's why they keep bringing up B-52s

those people want us to go live in the past
when Amerikans thought their empire would last.

Scott, Saddam's calling
Teen Iraqi girls online
No Burger Kings there

On the National Day of Poetry was also a reading by a large number of local poets, and some from outside the DC area.

Emily Warn, of Lynchburg, VA, in concordance with Poets the War, along with at least 30 other poets converged in front of the White House at 12 PM, at the site of the daily Code Pink vigil. The readings began with a poem sent by Stanley Kunitz, former US poet laureate, who is now 97 years old.

The sound footage you have posted mentioned the activities they had that day, and just like at the event you described at All Saint's, when they announced the poems were being taken to Capitol Hill to be entered into (hopefully), the Congressional record, everyone cheered.

Along with the poets, were a few of us who are local activitsts at the peace vigil in front of the White House, including myself, and the feminist theologian group, WATER, who came that day to be part of the vigil.

During the reading, a large group of students on a field trip to see the White House - junior high school aged - came over and stood right on the fence, to hear some of the poetry.

Remarkably, the Park Police (and with some persuasion), did not try to make the group disperse despite that we did surpass the 25 person limit.

One local poet came out and said he had just written his poem that morning and delivered an awesome spoken word performance - loudly. Others read their own poetry, primarily all anti-war poetry, and some read anti-war poetry by other published poets. One man read a poem Robert Lowell had written during the Vietnam War about why he declined an invitation to visit the White House.

Some workers at the Code Pink office had thought the poets were planning on staying at the White House longer, which is why I had - based on that information - posted an invitation here for people to come out until 5 PM. But they did leave before 2:30, headed for the offices of two members of Congress, after the guard at the White House fence, did, not surprisingly, refuse to allow the anthology Emily Warn attempted to hand him of poetry by poets across the United States who had submitted their work to the Poets Against the War web site. She mentioned that only 50 selected poems had been brought to enter into the Congressional record, as the number sumbitted amounted to thousands of pages. It's an inspiring web site to view, if you look at how many people have submitted their writing to this project. www.poetsagainstthewar.org

The entire event was videotaped by a crew filming for the Poets Against the War web site, and a number of photographers volunteering to help with that documentation project were present. I also took a number of pictures which will be developed and posted hopefully today.

This is from the poem I read, unfortunately I don't have copies offhand of any of the other poetry read, but will try to get some to post with the pictures:

from, "Making Peace",
A voice from the dark called out,
"The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war"

But peace, like a poem,
iis not there ahead of itself,
can't be imagined before it is made,
can't be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear
if we reconstructed the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses....

A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light-facets
of the forming crystal.

Denise Levertov; Breathing the Water, 1984

The time has come for thunderbolts
Of steel from the sky.
It is now right that murderers
Instead of children, die.
They have forged chains and thumbscrews while
We have made pleas and threats.
The portraits of the killer smile
But he must pay his debts.

A mountainside is split in two,
His coward legions fall.
His shackled cities fade from view
Beneath a smoky pall.
Armored treads sound in the street,
The tanks are not his own.
He has bid many to be slain.
He'll face his death alone.

Cineas told Pyrrhus that
'Rome has a thousand heads.'
And Rome was a republic, strong
After that king was dead.
The tyrant butchers live in fear
And we go on and on.
A century shall find us here
And every tyrant gone.

Our carriers loom off his coast.
Our bombers fill his skies.
And brave, skilled men with stealthy tread
Prepare his grim surprise.
Grant, and Sherman, Patton, Greene
Have taught us to make war.
We now pick up their legacy
And free the world once more.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident. That the United States is a corporate plutocracy with certain self-granted priviledges, among these are corporate life, corporate liberty, and the persuit of oil."

Between 1820 and 1920, approximately 34 million persons immigrated to the United States, three-fourths of them staying permanently. For many of these newcomers, their first glimpse of America was the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.

The Jewish American poet Emma Lazarus saw the statue as a beacon to the world. A poem she wrote to help raise money for the pedestal, and which is carved on that pedestal, captured what the statue came to mean to the millions who migrated to the United States seeking freedom, and who have continued to come unto this day.

What would these immigrants see in 2002?

A plutocracy without a friend in the world that rejects them, bringing to mind fear, financial extortion and U.S. Marine invasion, a bunch of ignorant frisky children and their equally childish keepers, cowering under corporate rule, armed to the teeth without an ounce of courage. A place of quick cruelty and empathetic shallowness that rejects all moral principles, a place without any vision of human aspirations for goodness, a place of electronic voter fraud, corporate organized crime, drug and gun running, voter intimidation, traitorous corporations, massive cancer and environmental pollution, repressive religiosity, intergenerational poverty and intergenerational inheritance, a two-headed one-party state laughing with a forked tongue in the growing darkness.


America: The Old Colossus

Like the brazen Colossus of Greek fame,
with conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sewage gates shall reek
A mighty prostitute, polluting the air with oil burn-off flame,
from the imprisoned lightning of carbon sludge,
and her name, Madam of Plutocracy.

From her polluting hand glows world-wide fear;
her cold eyes command a smog choked harbor rank
with exploited refugees of foreign coups small, and puppet leaders grand.

"O ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. Will be all mine!
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless I have created, tempest-tost to me,
I set them to work under the ghostly flame of a twilight whore!"

this is the new file for dj eurok, real name taken out.

this link goes to pictures and story on the Poets Against the War at the White House that day