by Gerard Donnelly Smith
Poetry
A horrific chapter in Iraqi history has been closed and now we are talking about a more hopeful chapter for the Iraqi people.
--President George W. Bush
(Swans - January 15, 2007)
We counted down the second, before reprieve interrupted
The moral debate, then the drunken conversation moved on
Until someone with a wireless phone announced
We'd missed the dance: the contortion and the corpse
Soon to plaster front pages, soon broadcast on blogs and i-Pods,
A macabre screensaver on some twisted shit's computer,
You-Tube face of death, raw-reality television episode.
From rat hole to trapdoor, from dictator to dangling man
To gallows' ghost, a short distance, really.
Now with his brother hung and bullet-riddled sons he confers;
Now with Eichmann, Goring, and Goebbles his fate compares;
Now with Pasha and Milosevic he daily laments,
And denies his actions with Akira, Koki, and Yamashita
Then justifies them in turn with Jean-Baptiste Gatete;
Now they are all roasting, roasting over the deepest pit:
A horrible Ghetto in the City of Dis
For genocidal maniacs and mass murderers.
Whom to next connect the dangling modifier
to hang?
To be hung those who orchestrated the propaganda?
To be hung those who broadcast the lies and cover-ups,
The gassing and butchering, the smart bombings and the burials?
We dangle round the question:
When the orders kill more civilians than insurgents,
More children than military personnel, then whom
Should history judge as having should have hanged?
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