Tuesday, July 7, 2009

THE REAL CURRENCY OF THE WORLD

THE REAL CURRENCY OF THE WORLD

 

The real currency of the world is a weapon,

the true spider-bankers of the world

behind their dripping grave nets,

full of the dismembered parts of people, 

arms manufacturers. And the weapons

may have evolved

at replicating themselves like genes,

but not the chimpanzees.

Why is it always disfigured old men,

icons of gluttony,

entrenched in their ideologies

like bad wisdom teeth

who send young men off to war

to die like brave ideas

so that they can replace

one bullet with more?

What better market could you wish for

than that in which you sell your product one day

and the boys and toys are broken the next

and tomorrow’s already unmanned?

There’s a young girl

with her knees drawn up to her chin

huddled in a doorway like a fossil.

She’s been broken like bread

among the ravaging soldiers

but still she’s starving.

She looks into the camera of the world

with the frank eyes of a child

who knows it for what it is and isn’t

way too early.

It’s a bag of flour

that’s been dropped

from the back of a truck.

It’s a pail in a makeshift sewer,

the Via Cloacum, the mother of flies;

it’s death to look at,

it’s death to see

inside and out,

both sides of her eyes,

the same mindless atrocity

on the same timeless TV.

mouthing the same processed compassion

as her death goes in and out of fashion.

I don’t know what’s happened to the sun

but in this century

everywhere you walk in the light

you’re followed by your own shadow

shouldering a gun.

And the black holes in the ground

where they keep the nuclear warheads

what are they already

even before they go off

if not mortal wounds

in the heart and mind and flesh of a child

you did not feed

you did not heal

you did not educate

you did not love

you did not keep from death?

Haven’t we learned yet

after so many mass graves

have been buried

by our sensitive distinctions,

that it’s the ghosts of the children we’ve killed

that foul our breath

with the stench of death within us?

Do we live so others can die?

Do we see and think and feel and imagine,

free to peek over the walls we built

by standing on someone else’s skull?

Is intelligence a cannibal

and the truest enterprise

of the human heart,

a blood sport?

Why defame God or the Devil

for suffering in the world

when we thrive

on the self-fulfilling atrocities

of our own evil?

Sweden and Israel

want to sell jet-fighters to India

but the Americans intervene

because Boeing and Northrup

fear the disclosure of their arts

might upstage the wizardry

of their latest, upgraded weaponry,

and there are rich men in exclusive offices

suppurating their morals into ulcers

anticipating dividends

to arm the rabid biophobes with fangs

to make a child haemmorage like a rose?

A million people killed,

ripped like pages from their lives

for every year of the last century

and we’re barely into this one

and how many children

have already been surrendered

to the jaws of Moloch and Baal

eating like overfed brokers of death

in an elegant, Washington hotel?

Love has to put a hood over its head

and lie down with the dead

whenever these assholes

take a woman to bed

to expurgate their stealth

with the roomy privileges of wealth.

How many children

can dance the danse macabre

on the slaughter-house floor

of the credit-card that killed them?

And even when you give back

to those you’ve taken from

your gifts are wrapped

in the skin and ribbons of blood

you’ve exacted like a cosmetic scalpel

from every child you’ve cut

like a bruise from an apple

or the green star

at the core of the planet

that shines over them like seeds.

 

PATRICK WHITE