Selected Works, Volume One On Sale
Jerry Prager, author of Legends of the Morgeti vol 1 &2 has published selections of poetry and prose from three of his previously published books, his blog The Well Versed Heart and unpublished works. On Sale at Macondo Books, the Bookshelf, in Guelph and the Eden Mills Writers Fest.
D'Etre Raisins

No sour grapes these,

rather the withered sweetness
of seasons lengthened
to aged fruition
chewed introspectively.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Canadastan Support

More soldiers die in Afghanistan
and we are told it is our duty
to support our troops because
they are willing to die to help Afghanis
and I believe that is why the common soldiers
are there, for it is not so much
they who wield the weapons as it is
those who command them, those who create policy
whose aims I do not trust.

What the Minister of Defense
wants from Canadians
is an adherence
to political, economic
and ideological idolatries
I do not share: their public policy
masks a privateering imperialism,
and conceals caves of unholy alliances,

false reformers parading their faith
behind patriotic proclamations
in unison with Bush League bunglers
and Babylonian Whore mongers:
survivors of WWII anti-fascist campaigns
in Europe where Canadian
soldiers died by the tens of thousands

while North American profiteers and
black and brown shirt collaborators
were left free to grow strong and prosper
until the day they finally seized power through
the breaking of chads and the tampering
of electronics and through lie upon lie
still emanating from the Terror war-room
in Washington.

This nation's
right wing liberals and conservatives
benefit from the sustained hostilities
that fill the coffers of
America International Incorporated and
its subsidiary principalities and powers
and despite all that, I accept the belief of soldiers
and their families that they give their lives
and loved ones in the cause of Afghanis.

As for Minister MacKay and his generals
their words are deceptions
and the utterances of the Prime Minister
are a sulfurous stench.

2 comments:

g-test said...

The US does not want to share and so it has and does sabotage the Canadian industries that benefit in wartime. A slight modification to your proposal; I can cite a few examples of major corporate sabotage by US military. The most recent is Northern Telecom. Avro Arrow rings a bell that continues to resonate today. If you consider the landscape of 'ownership' we are foreigners in our own country, I think we sold our last steel mill. Our politicians are redundant and ineffective. Their presence is merely decoy for what is really happening. Proposing that they are gleaning some benefit from US military actions or participating in some clandestine conspiracy would be giving them credit for having courage and also giving the US credit for being generous and including their foreign neigbours in the profit taking.

I find the stock market reports at the end of the day like the droning commentary for drugged up dog races.

Unknown said...

Yeats. Keep writing political poetry: it's a lost art, and one that was always rare, but when the artistry work this well, the message has always remained, whether followed (even more rare) or only told and retold--an enduring vision of the damage governments have always wrought.