O Say Can You Hear?
The dripping Gorgon¹s head
over the sands of Iraq, spittle of snakes flame out
from a thousand gun barrels
at last! the two worlds unite in the death struggle,
the two as one to make a third:
fantasy is reality is fantasy.
America has become its own horror cartoon,
each thought locked within its renegade cell,
Bugs Bunny holds forth in the senate on
the bankrupt dream-stocks buried at Fort Knox.
Donald Duck meantime jerks off in disgust
over the American flag - quacks
the country¹s been bushwacked,
Œain¹t worth a hill of beans¹
in archaic colloquialisms of a nation near claim
jumping the Middle East.
The last capitalist gasp v the last medieval groan;
eventually, to make way for the eco-terrorists whose
motto: destroy what you cannot save: will sound
the retreat to a history vaporised a memory erased.
So we come to inherit ŒOur Common Loss¹.
The Space Shuttle Columbia makes
its long wave Œgood-bye¹
bright finger nails tearing at the sky (like)
Œmorning Lucifer, that star that beckons all
mankind to daily rounds¹
scratching down God¹s blackboard
as seven souls fly away
toward the Pleiades.
So we make our omens to live and die by.
Stephen Oliver, 2003
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephen Oliver b. 1950. Grew in Brooklyn-west, Wellington, New Zealand. Author of six major collections of poetry, including: Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000, HeadworX Publishers, 2001. One year Magazine Journalism course, Wellington Polytechnic. Radio NZ Broadcasting School. Casual Radio Actor. Lived in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco, Greece and Israel. Signed on with the radio ship, ŒThe Voice of Peace¹ broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa. Free lanced as production voice, newsreader, announcer, voice actor, journalist, copy and features writer. Poems widely represented in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, USA, UK, South Africa, Canada, etc. Recently published, DEADLY POLLEN, a poetry chapbook, Word Riot Press, (USA) 2003. Forthcoming: a CD of poems titled: KING HIT - Selected Readings written and read by Stephen Oliver to original music composed by Matt Ottley, for international release. Stephen is a transtasman poet and writer who lives in Sydney. http://people.smartchat.net.au/~sao/