The Poets Who Are Our Enemies

are not writing poems for beauty's sake.

Their poems come in bottles from the sea

to be put to our ears like conches.

There are poems buried in the sands

of prison yards, backyards, sequestered

under stones, stone that was once the walls

of a city, of a station, of a house, of a room in the heart

of a house.

Poems are torn from the hidden notebooks

of poets in hiding. Poems are disguised

as tails on long-stringed kites, are given to carrier

pigeons disguised as more common birds.

Some poems fall, or are thrown down. Wads

like grout between cracked tile.

The poets who are ours

to battle may lose everything to pipes, to wire and glass,

to objects simple enough to be found in a cabinet.

These poets may die by fast talkers, by mistake, by gun, by bomb,

and some by God by choice. The poets write to us

of children and of strangers. They write

with fingers in their ears to hear themselves think.

Their poems are the only thing clear where little else is

clear. The poems speak of a meal of lemons, of baskets

in an alley, of leather, and of the sea. Always the sun-

swallowing sea.

The poets who are our enemies are not writing

for a canon, their letters black as smoke

filling an emptied square. They are writing for their lives.

Some are dead already

by the time their poems finally reach us.

Their letters, bold as the cry of a dog heard over shells.

Poems that speak plainly of a hand that seeks

a hand, but, finding nothing, reaches still.