By Duane Niatum

One day you said to me,
“there’s nothing you can do,”
and recited Auden’s line:
“Poetry makes nothing happen.”
Although I honor your pinched music,
the poems you dipped in light,
those pulsing like a rainbow
before slipping from our sight,
I wanted to ask you why
several dives out of the self,
a sweet woman’s open caress,
a hundred books with stories
gyrating with people and places
never diminished my confusion.

You did agree that at least
Old Socrates was right
in telling his Athenian friends
that governments are only that—
a person with many heads
that cannot think as one.
History will go on showing
them swing from peace
to war and back again,
in one wide gallows-sweep
just as the pendulum
of the world’s clocks
returns its towns to craters.

Fifteen cobalt-blue years later,
I must ask myself, if the dust
and rubble of each new war
that settles in our bones
and deadens a generation,
are little more than negatives
of the Kennedys, King and Lennon,
has less weight than what
we felt the day the Apollo spaceship
landed on the moon,
and Auden’s line is true,
then why did you til your last breath,
sing into your ruin?
 

• Arts & Sciences
• Social Commentaries

Poet Bio

Born Duane McGinness in Seattle, poet, fiction writer, playwright, and editor Duane Niatum adopted the name of one of his S’Klallam tribal ancestors early in his career as a poet. After his parents’ divorce when he was four, he studied S’Klallam tribal ways with his maternal grandfather. At age 17, Niatum joined the Navy and was stationed in Japan. Influenced by Theodore Roethke, John Keats, and Octavio Paz, Niatum composes lyric poems exploring themes of romantic love and cultural heritage. He still lives in Seattle and has taught at Evergreen State College and the University of Washington, as well as area high schools. See More By This Poet

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