What We Did While We Made More Guns - Dorothy Barresi

[Larry Robinson]

What We Did While We Made More Guns


Prayed.
Dug mass graves.
Raped the daughters of the enemy, who,
in their terror,
turned back into swans.
Placed war orphans in loving homes.
Pinned honorifics
to field-dressed shadows,
recruited hommes noirs
to fill empty jail cells and swans
with their coruscating metallic cries
to lend comic grace
to memorial fountains.
The exchange of gifts, the games, the tilts, the jousts
the masques,
proceeded without irony.
The year’s cotillion was elegantly attended
by debutantes in a glowing
orange and red silk tent
before an amputated audience
of officers, some crying,
some propped on tiny
keepsake pillows.
We prayed.
Prayed for peace
through victory.
Sang the old hymns—
It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, oh Lord….
Planted winter wheat. Let it rot,
the alcohol smell sweet and scouring.
Planted corn.
Ate the mice that overran the field
instead, blood and small hides
in our cupped hands, and
purpose,

our hair
dripping as though we had just stepped
from a bath with our beloved.
The dead we have with us always.
Livestock were fed broken chocolate bars
to fatten provisions
quickly.
Guts ruined, they bellowed all night
but we were sleeping
only two or three hours now,
there was so much to do—
tunnels to torch,
missile silos to polish with our hair.
Cops and
students of political science
orated like gods in parking lots
decorated with thousands of yellow ribbons,
red searchlights
scalded the possible flight paths
of our urgency, everyone useful, finally, everyone
making corrections
to sacrifice,
beauty to conviction.
Paying prisoners of war
one bucket of water
for the truth.
Two if it wasn’t any good.

	- Dorothy Barresi