We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living
Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world,
And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.

-- WB Yeats

In the fevered portent of Pharaoh dreams
airmen pontificate upon 'Five Rings'
to strangle, destroy, disrupt - war's machine,
enkindling a prosecuting fire.
They rail against centers of gravity
while bombers shriek like barbed-wire Sirens
______ to pen the moon-blind dreams of suckling youth.

Yet 'critical nodes' leave lingering casts
who cannot sense, nor reach, procreate, speak, or walk.
For what center of gravity, critical node
are these children of strangers that sojourn,
to be beaten back out of the door of life?
Wherefore Fatima's tears rival Rachel's
______ in the day of the sabers of Herod.

In depleted uranium seedbeds
lie the depleted futures, envenomed
in unborn blood, and swept into dustbins
like Hiroshima's luminescent bones.
Yet can we speak of precision warheads
when children of Al-Jumhuriyah bleed?
______ Are tears the urgency of the world's hour?

While sanctions uphold Ignorance and Want,
we forge unmourning weapons to burrow
ever deep into the Chaldean womb,
entering again, fields of the fatherless.
We have done what is right in our own eyes,
sown the fields with sulfur; plowed with lasers,
______ and there is famine reigning in the land.

Here, other specters usurp the regime:
______ Meningitis, Cancer, Leukemia.
Each month a battalion of children die
as a mother's devouring echo
begs inquiry into iniquity:
______ What gain is this unflowering harvest -
______________ this beckoning pale of simplified dead?

Jeffrey Alfier



Jeffrey Alfier currently lives in Germany, holds an MA in Humanities (California State University, 1990), and has served as an adjunct faculty member for City Colleges of Chicago - European Division. In addition, he is a member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and Phi Kappa Phi. His previous publishing credits - outside of professional journals - include 'Nieve Roja Review' (Colorado State University), 'Poetry Magazine', 'Pyrowords', 'Coffee Time Blues', 'Poetfest', 'Poetic Express', and 'Sauce*Box'.