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Sunday, June 06, 2010

Prisons of Diamond [Today's News Poem, June 6, 2010]

Prisons of Diamond [Today's News Poem, June 6, 2010]

They've crowned you with gemstones that shine in the sunlight.
The panels are sparkling and cover the deserts.
A circuit connects all the disparate pieces.
Beneath your exterior, cables and plumbing
Have drawn you away from your calling as mother.
Your thoughts look like clouds that were launched from a furnace.
Your skin: does it crawl from the movement of servos?

And under the moon and the blades of the chopper
Who squirms on your surface? Who rides in the bushes
A horse made of gristle? Who launches the rocket
That scorches the poppies? Who feeds the survivors?
The surface is buried. Who's digging a passage
Through prisons of diamond, to farm on the rubble—
Unless that's your secret—we're already smothered.

“Mr. Matiullah is one of several semiofficial warlords who have emerged across Afghanistan in recent months, as American and NATO officers try to bolster — and sometimes even supplant — ineffective regular Afghan forces in their battle against the Taliban insurgency.”
– Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, June 5, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/world/asia/06warlords.html?hpw

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