The News. Jeffrey Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Why the laughter, why the dead

      what the child said when asked

      who and where and why?

      Clarity, cliché—polished package

      that wraps the unwrappable.

      Here it is, your day.

Song: Lead Story

      If it bleeds it leads

      and if it bleeds it feeds

      the want of eyes

      and I who bring you

      this festival of fear

      If it bleeds it leads

      and if it bleeds it sees

      the devouring eyes

      and I who recite you

      this carnival of crime

      If it bleeds it leads

      and if it bleeds it reads

      the hunger of eyes

      and I who offer you

      this parade of pain

      If it bleeds it leads

      and if it bleeds it needs

      the sanction of eyes

      and I who perform you

      this theater of theft

      If it bleeds it leads

      and if it bleeds it heeds

      the fickleness of eyes

      and I who play you

      this symphony of sin

      If it bled it led

      the broken the dead

      the aversion of eyes

      and I who sing you

      this lyric of loss

Haiti

      “Epidemiologically this area is terrifying”

      La Saline—the giant slum

      on a sun-soaked shit-soaked morning

      as the children filled their buckets

      from a makeshift well. The pigs

      scavenged while a rat watched

      all. Why bother to hide?

      La Saline: somewhere nearby

      the assaulted salted sea.

      Days later, the last light high

      in the Central Plateau so far so

      bone-crushed by the road (I’d

      argued against going), Saut d’Eau.

      They filled the benches

      and told us of death upon death.

      A man who’d lost his son:

      “I am a bird left without

      a branch to land on.”

Beirut

      “This is the family tradition: my father

      killed by his bodyguards, his father

      killed. They chose sides, chose right

      and then wrong and he who longs for

      the security of death in his bed must

      leave this country. My son knows this

      and his will too.” Within the same frame

      the eye deceives, meanings hide when

      you stand outside this history. What

      I’d thought was construction, a building

      with views toward the sea, on the rise,

      was its opposite, destruction: pockmarked,

      see-through, gun-wrecked Holiday Inn,

      monument against forgetting. Restaurants

      filled, kebabs on the grill, and on this day

      jets in Gaza, far to the south. In the south

      of this city, craters from other jets

      left, again, unfilled, while a billboard

      touts the Party of God. Permission

      required to aim the camera, granted by

      Hezbollah—watching us watching them

      watching them watching us, and all know

      who controls these streets. Later I walk the

      Corniche, in this Paris of the Middle East—

      was it ever so? Two decades of war—

      from Little Mountain: “We were looking

      for the sea.” Look again, so close, here!

      And there, can it be? The familiar choice

      of chocolate or glazed, no wrong or right.

      Hezbollah by day, Dunkin’ Donuts at night.

      Auden saw it in Brueghel’s Icarus:

      within the same frame, tragedy plus

      a girl eating ice cream, strawberry.

      This is what we encounter, too: memories

      that encompass craters and bombed hotels,

      faces red with hate at the jets overhead.

      But also the sound of the oud, the light

      in the park, nervous fathers watching for falls.

Joplin

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