Megiddo Junction
by Janet Buck
Megiddo Junction, Israel.
Rush hour sprayed with body parts.
Forty wounded. A passenger bus
reduced to obsidian skeletons.
The poets I know are living
in bowls of bloodshed
weeping the sides of the clay.
They long for a different breath
where smoking wreckage
isn't all they own for air.
What is evil, what is good --
murky as clear goldfish glass
poisoned by conditioned veins.
Reuters assembles a calendar:
two years inside millenniums, not a month
is exempt from the strike of a needless death.
Not a week slides by unrattled
by hatred showing its moldering eye.
Plums could be a wet grenade.
Armageddon heads a simple grocery list.
As fingers attempt the dance of their art,
others are pushing the buttons of bombs.
Resolving these wars is not in their books.
It seems a reach without arms.
Religious factions fracturing,
jabberwocky politics, where beards
are shaking their dust over
the bin of a spreading grave.
Last night's news said:
"65 miles of fences in store..."
Adding more height to toppling sense.
Twisting the barb, stacking the stone.
Fences are already thick.
Crush and crash are license plates.
Victims, victims everywhere --
like cherry blossoms grace our streets.
I slice and dice a seedless melon,
thinking of black olive pits.
Janet Buck's poetry, poetics, and fiction have appeared in The Pedestal
Magazine, Poetry Magazine.com, CrossConnect, The Pittsburgh Quarterly,
Kimera, The Rose & Thorn, 2River View, Southern Ocean Review, Disquieting
Muses, Urban Spaghetti, Perihelion, Mind Fire, Born Magazine, pif, 3rd Muse,
Verse Libre Quarterly, Big Bridge, pith and hundreds of journals world-wide.
Buck was one of U.S. poets to be featured at the "One Heart, One World"
Exhibit at the United Nations Exhibit Hall in New York City in April, 2000.
In January 2001, Art Villa Records released Janet's first audio CD of poetry
and music called Before the Rose. It is available at:
http://www.artvilla.com/shopping/poetry/rose.htm
To hear a sample from the CD, go to:
http://www.artvilla.com/mp3/umbrellas.mp3.
Note: Featured
author in January 2001
E-mail: JBuck22874@aol.com
Writing interests: Poetry
Poems: "The
Orphan", "Caught
in Lesser Tragedies", "The
Broken Promise", "The
Gargoyle", "The
Going", "The
Bag Lady", "Rushing
Toward Entelechy", "The
Paralyzed Apocalypse", "Frozen
Sonnets", "New
York, New York", "Live
on CNN", "America
Under Siege", "Gutter
Balls"
Links: Hot Links:
Janet I. Buck, Janet's
Latest Interview, Desideratum's
Doggie Dish, Author's Den,
Active Amp.org—Features
Janet I. Buck, Poetry
Magazine.Com-October-Janet Buck, The
Part-time Postmodernist (August 2000), San
Francisco Salvo, Moongate:
Janet I. Buck, Offcourse, The October
Country , Cafe
Society: Poetry Life & Times, Kookamonga
Square, The
Adirondack Review , janetbuck.com, Funky Dog
Publishing—Janet Buck's Strawberry Nipples, Athens
Avenue—Janet I. Buck, One
World-One Heart Exhibit , Ygdrasil:
Issue 9 September 2000