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FREEDOMWAYS SECOND QUARTER 1973 Pandering their cankerous wares In the marketplace of death . . . Am I their cohort . . . What manner of mother am I Standing stock-still In the filled-in swamp Outside their battlements Watching their mock maneuvers Manipulate a Nation's fate . . . My hands take tempting tidbits From their store of war-spoils— Strip-mined from foreign forests By megalomaniac monsters To use in bribery by me . . . Compromiser of the dead to be done Before my sons become fully grown Old enough to be blown like lotus leaves To sleep on foreign shores In Africa or Asia . . . Sun shadows shower the earth Searching out the birthing From the fertile furrows . . . In the Asian peasant's paddies It is the noon nursing hour For the fear sprung-out crying Clawing at the hungry mouth Of the just born tawny boy, Born To be torn — still sucking From the soft bosomed sanctuary Of the milk-heavy breast . . . And the wounded woman wails Flinging my memory back — seeing My own son flung forth From the spongy hearth Of my child-thick body - Cast atop the stainless table top Barren steel — cold nothingness Christen-stinging his tiny tendons, Touching the trembling air-stung lips Seizing his primal gasp of breath 148
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-21 18:12:03