My tears carry the salt of dead oceans
            To the new clear-cut
            Among the absence of oak, poplar, and ash
            A wood thrush passes, dazed as I am

            There is something in the sound
            Of an axe biting green wood
            That fills this arm of the forest
            Calling all the years and all the dead
            Here to accompany my song of fires to come
            My father hitting the same notch

                Nothing anyone says touches the situation.
                Strangers who most love their countries
                Face each other over tables.

                Everyone agrees that senseless killing
                Is senseless. Not everyone agrees
                That sensible killing is senseless.

                Lord, let this world choke
                on its ragged masses,

                let it gag on its damned,
                its guilty and its guiltless--no,

                no innocent souls, guide them all
                hand in hand, not to heaven

                When power is placed in the service of vicious reaction, a language must be called into being which does its best to appropriate such obscenity of power and throw its excesses back in its face. Criticism of such language is simply squeamish or christianly--language being expected to turn the other cheek, not stick out its tongue; offer a handshake of reconciliation, not stick up a finger in an obscene, defiant gesture...

--Wole Soyinka, 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature
       

                We must kill!
                They must die!

                They must die!
                We must kill!

            Some broad American flower is growing
            on the prairie, opening in intervals,
            a heart. Walking from the train tracks
            the flat-faced drunks on Hennepin don't care.

            Well, you know it's true
            I go in the morning to the twenty-acre wood
            lodged between meaner homes.
            One day I'll examine one day getting by, getting shorter.

            Owls’ calls have abandoned me
            Delicate sounds before first light
            Betray only the restlessness of small birds
            In this lull before the water
            Claims its color from the emerging horizon

            I have heard you
            In rooms close with the scents
            Of old wool clothing and cut flowers
            Sunday after Sunday
            Your voice recalling the slow, incessant rhythm
            Of a bell tossed on its marker buoy
            By gray swells under a hard bank of clouds