style="font-size:15px;"> Why the laughter, why the dead
what the child said when asked
who and where and why?
Clarity, cliché—polished package
that wraps the unwrappable.
Here it is, your day.
Song: Lead Story
If it bleeds it leads
and if it bleeds it feeds
the want of eyes
and I who bring you
this festival of fear
If it bleeds it leads
and if it bleeds it sees
the devouring eyes
and I who recite you
this carnival of crime
If it bleeds it leads
and if it bleeds it reads
the hunger of eyes
and I who offer you
this parade of pain
If it bleeds it leads
and if it bleeds it needs
the sanction of eyes
and I who perform you
this theater of theft
If it bleeds it leads
and if it bleeds it heeds
the fickleness of eyes
and I who play you
this symphony of sin
If it bled it led
the broken the dead
the aversion of eyes
and I who sing you
this lyric of loss
Haiti
“Epidemiologically this area is terrifying”
La Saline—the giant slum
on a sun-soaked shit-soaked morning
as the children filled their buckets
from a makeshift well. The pigs
scavenged while a rat watched
all. Why bother to hide?
La Saline: somewhere nearby
the assaulted salted sea.
Days later, the last light high
in the Central Plateau so far so
bone-crushed by the road (I’d
argued against going), Saut d’Eau.
They filled the benches
and told us of death upon death.
A man who’d lost his son:
“I am a bird left without
a branch to land on.”
Beirut
“This is the family tradition: my father
killed by his bodyguards, his father
killed. They chose sides, chose right
and then wrong and he who longs for
the security of death in his bed must
leave this country. My son knows this
and his will too.” Within the same frame
the eye deceives, meanings hide when
you stand outside this history. What
I’d thought was construction, a building
with views toward the sea, on the rise,
was its opposite, destruction: pockmarked,
see-through, gun-wrecked Holiday Inn,
monument against forgetting. Restaurants
filled, kebabs on the grill, and on this day
jets in Gaza, far to the south. In the south
of this city, craters from other jets
left, again, unfilled, while a billboard
touts the Party of God. Permission
required to aim the camera, granted by
Hezbollah—watching us watching them
watching them watching us, and all know
who controls these streets. Later I walk the
Corniche, in this Paris of the Middle East—
was it ever so? Two decades of war—
from Little Mountain: “We were looking
for the sea.” Look again, so close, here!
And there, can it be? The familiar choice
of chocolate or glazed, no wrong or right.
Hezbollah by day, Dunkin’ Donuts at night.
Auden saw it in Brueghel’s Icarus:
within the same frame, tragedy plus
a girl eating ice cream, strawberry.
This is what we encounter, too: memories
that encompass craters and bombed hotels,
faces red with hate at the jets overhead.
But also the sound of the oud, the light
in the park, nervous fathers watching for falls.
Joplin
