poem
Volume 26, Number 4

from Peacenik

While D.C. and London made up their minds
about the missing weapons, I went home
to my NGO, and got shipped into war’s
nostrils, as seen from our Baghdad office. I wrote reports
on water, electricity, schools. I even wrote a mock utility
bill addressed to death—“what it cost to get you all these bodies.”

Death in its way wrote back, scattering bodies
round what had been my office. No merchant minds
his store better, and there’s no problem paying the utility
bill, when half the world reads by muzzle flash.


—Michael Collins