Norman MacAfee 2

LIFE DURING THE COUP [CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8]

How many Iraqis killed by Americans?
A quarter million.
How many Americans killed by Iraqis?
A hundred.
How many Iranians killed by Iraqis?
A million.
How many Iraqis killed by Iranians?
A million.
How many Israelis killed by Arabs?
Some thousands.
How many Arabs killed by Israelis?
Some horrible multiple of that
(ten times, as promised?).
Who sold them all arms?

People ask me what to do.
Force Israel and Palestinians
to make peace. Cut US
energy use in half. Wean
US from fossil fuels. Fund safe
sources of renewable energy.
Legislate conservation. Fund
research into new sources.
Withdraw from Gulf. Stop consuming
so much. Bring the perpetrators
to justice, but do not start
a war to do it. A world war
against terrorism is stupid and evil.

I saw the worst buildings of my generation crash,
I heard myriad souls rise in chorus in a flash...
their dust on our sills, our city.

Ned Rorem believes humanity is doomed,
because it has figured out ways
to destroy itself. But Ned, at
78, can believe that. Near to his
end, his world ends. I need decades
more to do what I was born to do.

Warning comes by email:
Beware virus with phrase “Peace
Between America and Islam” in title.

Miguel’s dream:
Two tall glass towers,
filled with water; one has
algae in it, the other fish.
The fish are trying
to get to the algae.
We decide that all
dreams are socialist.

The Towers went up.
The rich got richer.
The poor got poorer.
The Towers came down.

Firefighters and police died
pulling people from the towers.
Three books at one fireman’s bed:
Iliad, War and Peace, Moby Dick.
Financiers the firefighters
died trying to save were
wasting their lives, our lives,
destroying the world, the younger
ones brainwashed by Reagan
to worship Mammon.

Clinton: peace, prosperity,
democracy, empathy. Bush:
stolen election, broken treaties,
recession, environmental destruction,
coup, military tribunals, cruelty,
stupidity. I kept saying “How
awful” for hours after the attack,
out on the street, but I had been
saying that, too, about the coup
since December 12, 2000.

December 23, 2001. I try to get
the Bach Festival on the radio.
Static only. I call Columbia.
They’re broadcasting from campus
with a weak signal. A certain building
fell down, says the boy on the phone.

“Lucky me,” says Bush. “I
won the trifecta! War, recession,
and a national emergency!”

Christmas 2001 at 2001—
on big-screen Astor Plaza—
but projectionist can’t focus.
The mechanical perfection of
Kubrick’s art depends on
mechanical view of humanity.
The showing, really a performance
by projectionist, is a disaster.

In an attempt to reach out, we
phone Bush and ask him if he
saw 2001. He screams, “I don’t
remember! I was drunk for twenty
years for Crissakes” and hangs up.

We are trying to retake who we were
and what we were doing before 9/11.

Osama didn’t imagine the Towers
would actually collapse. He was
the most optimistic of his gang.
At most ten floors, he chuckled.

The two percent wealthiest
have declared war on the rest of us.
Their power is so vast that, I fear
for the first time ever, it could all
be over. If everything the Bushites
do is a lie, what can the rest of us do?
If they now kill us all, they can win.

The worst is not so long as we can say “the worst.”

March 18, 2002: for my 59th
birthday, Bush has taken away
constant air cover from New York.
Everyone feels more vulnerable again.
But we won’t really feel safe till there is
equal distribution of world’s wealth
and that won’t begin to happen until
Bushites get life in the slammer.

“The whole tribe is from one man’s body.
How else can one think of it?”
Ezra Pound, The Cantos. Pasolini
quotes that in Salò as fascists torture
and kill the young, and also quotes
Baudelaire: “The bourgeoisie have never
hesitated killing their young.”

Trying to understand Gilgamesh again.
Maybe that will help. They “went hand
in hand to the Euphrates, and washed
their hands in the calm river waters.”
How to live in a tragic world and be happy!

Knowing now for the first time
what it feels like, the American people,
or New Yorkers, or at least those below
14th Street may feel less like waging war.

I find a scrap of paper: Local Hero.
The Red and the Black. “I paint.” “Science.”

Hollywood is remaking 9/11, rebuilding
the Towers then destroying them, with
Tom Cruise as Giuliani. “Born with a face lift.”

There is America, and then there is
the other America. The United Fruit
Company, oiligarchs, Wall Street Journal,
Kissinger, Bushes, whose default is war;
and heroic America: Washington who
refused a crown; Jefferson who made
all people equal forever; Lincoln who
emancipated those Jefferson forgot;
FDR who saved us from fascism;
JFK who saved us from annihilation;
Carter who spoke of human rights;
Clinton whose default was peace.

Bush Justice Department
investigates accounting practices of
CNN parent TimeWarner—
blackmailing CNN into
playing nice with Bush.

Village Voice publishes a cartoon
of Bush as a Hitler who is stupid.

New Yorker proves The Towers were
flimsy, built on the cheap. As they
went up, construction workers
shook their heads. It was all air
so the owners could rent more space.

The poet takes his knowledge to
the capital, and plays: “The king is
a murderer!” The kingdom collapses.

The Towers went up. The rich got richer.
The poor got poorer. The Towers came down.

(Fall 2000 to Spring 2002)

FOR ROBERT KENNEDY’S 80^TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION
(READ AT THE MANSFIELD ROOM OF THE U.S. CAPITOL, NOVEMBER 16, 2005)

On November 16, 2005, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights held a reception at the U.S. Capitol to celebrate what would have been the 80th birthday of Robert Kennedy (1925-1968). People influenced by him spoke, including Senators Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Representatives John Lewis, Dennis Kucinich, and Edward Markey, Dolores Huerta, Father Robert Drinan, and Rabbi Michael Lerner. I spoke about politics and culture then read a poem to RFK written the day before. The event was shown on C-SPAN.

I write this in Bush’s America
of torturing, Bush lying us to
war, Bush laughing at
the gap between the rich
and poor increasing.

No one knows what you
would be like today.
I am not a mathematician
so have no equations
to bring you to 80
and tell us what you
and the world would be
like had you lived.

Thanksgiving 1967:
I came to New York
alone to live my life
with you as my senator
and I hoped my president.

June 1968: I had no TV,
was writing poetry about
Vietnam, went to bed for
a restless night, dreaming of
anguished voices in subway tunnels
beneath Astro Place and woke to
a beautiful morning and
moaning in the streets and shops.
You were dying. The line was a mile
long for your Saint Pat’s requiem.

Alone in an East Village room
that fall I wrote the words
“nostalgia for the future,”
not quite realizing
they were for you.

Your words and thoughts that year
kept you alive these years.
You became the president
of the other America
that we have carried around
thirty-seven years. You became
the president of this other America
that we salute today, where
everyone has a job and some hope,
where there is but one class,
where we honor the arts of
“mercy, pity, peace and love.”

Peace to you, “warring soul
with your delicate anger.”
Peace to our bloody world!

NORMAN MACAFEE’s most recent books are The Coming of Fascism to America (New York: Bowery Poetry Club, 2006); The Death of the Forest (Amsterdam: Blankert 2004), opera by Norman MacAfee to music of Charles Ives; and The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now (New York and Boulder: Basic Books/Westview 2004). Forest, a chamber variation on The Death of the Forest directed by Beppie Blankert, will premiere in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Amsterdam and New York City in 2007. Norman MacAfee co-translated the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Farrar Straus Giroux 1996, Random House 1982), the letters of Jean-Paul Sartre (Scribner, Penguin UK, 1993, 1994), and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (Signet 1987). MacAfee’s first book of poetry was A New Requiem (Cheap Review Press 1988). “Life During the Coup” and “For Robert Kennedy’s 80th Birthday Celebration” are part of a new poetry manuscript, One Class.