Given pictures to digest, more likely ingest
the ugliness,
the dry, ugly scene.
Embedded weapons of mass media.


Images seen for the 101st time,
pushing up the rear now
of Baghdad’s gray-green streets
popping like an independence day,
like spikes in the demographic
at all the right times.

—These strange daylight hours.

Have you been cheated—
misguided, misleaded by the aging Wolf?

Like helmets and playing cards and footballs and fathers:
Basra, Umm Qasr, Nasiriya, Mosul.
All grown-men,
but boys, really,

now swimming in the Gulf of Freedom.
Not arrows! Not red and blue bloody arrows!

We watch, we witness, we speak—
what do we see?

03/27/2003

Posted on 04/24/2003
Copyright © 2024 Daniel Peterson