Happy anniversary

A poem about war and fullness

^{Guernica by Pablo Picasso}

Dear Readers,

I’ve been reading Bob Hicok’s This Clumsy Living. Written seventeen years ago, this poem is ever so relevant. Though I wish it weren’t…

May the wars vanish from our lives,

Karan

Happy anniversary

by Bob Hicok

                       March 19, 2006

There is a war.

This is a brand of minimalism: there are many wars.

Whenever you are reading this, this is the case: 
people running and screaming and sharp things and dull pains.

A softness of phantom limbs marching through the forest.

Arms attached to legs, legs attached to dream.

Whenever you are reading this, you may be killing, you may be dead.

I was thinking, I should mow the lawn, buy milk, stop the war.

Let's all add that to our lists: learn Spanish, meet Jesus, 
stop the war.

All past lists and future lists, all notions of mind, 
all wonderings above the frost-wounded daffodils—
will they make it, doctor, will they pull through?— 
should include this unsophisticated breath.

There is my war in the now and your war in the then.

Other things I can predict: snow, lava, vowels, the heat-seeking 
qualities of money.

Stop.

Long enough to enter the cratered, the moon fields and marionette 
the dead, to wear them on your body as your body,
as if you've reeled-in your shadow, as if you're holding
how you'll be forgotten in your arms.

Until the word empty whispers, I am full.

Until the shadow fits.

This poem is from This Clumsy Living by Bob Hicok, published by Pitt Poetry Press, 2007

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Read more of Bob Hicok’s poems published at ONLY POEMS.