Here, richly, with ridiculous display,
     The Politician’s corpse was laid away.
     While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
     I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
          - Hillaire Belloc, Epitaph on the Politician Himself
 

Posted in Pffa in what from memory was then a separate board for poems about Iraq; but a search turns it up in the General archive. The misspelling of Villanelle is intended to let me nod to the form rather than obey it.

Our topic is the sacking of the Baghdad Archaeological Museum that accompanied the US entry into Baghdad. President Bush had been specifically advised that this was very likely to happen but nothing was done to prevent it.

VILLANEL

     Iraq 2003

It’s all anthropology
how the living win
and the dead lose

Ah killers
and murderers
the dead lose

Ah thieves
selling the Baghdad Museum
the living win

This or that man
of insufficient venality
being dead, losing

Ah civilization!
and the dream of it
and the living and the winning

It’s all feathers
any wind takes it
anthropology and apology
and the dead lose

     2003
 

Posted in Pffa in Challenges in the thread Fukyu.

FUKYU

To defeat Evil
either get down and dirty
or prepare to lose;

and our way of life
and our hard-won civil rights,
our freedom itself,

everything that makes
our culture so valuable -
they'll have to go, natch.

     2005
 

Posted in Pffa in Love.

SONG OF TOTAL DESIRE

I love you more than life itself
and I blaze to possess you!
My own deepest joy and passion,
lie still while I caress you.

I’ll worship you till all the oil and gas
are atmospheric CO2;
till the miners and I are in the pub
for want of anything to do.

When the last atom of the lanthanides
is thrown out, scattered, lost,
I’ll comb for it in your lovely wet places
limited only by considerations of cost.

My desire, my soul, I’m yours alone
till neither fish nor cetacean
nor plankton nor even curling kelp
is known in the wide ocean.

Till I, the ultimate manufacturer
have finished dumping toxin
and dusting everything that’s alive
with mercury, 235U and dioxin.

I’ll love you till the eternal stars
can never more be seen.
It’s you I need till nothing of plant
or algae remains that’s green.

But when you’ve given all, my love,
and have no more to give
and when I’ve taken all, my love,
and can no longer live,

what choice, what choice do you leave me
but to find another?
A favour: never tell her
how I fucked my mother.

     2006