My younger colleague told me, when I praised the poem
of a dead white man, that this was microaggression.
I tried to explain that the poem protested aggression too,
during the war in Vietnam. By bashing McNamara,
then the Secretary of Defense, the poem advocated peace.
My colleague said he advocated peace by bashing me.
Differences in scale and point of view may be deceptive.
Gamma rays, for example, with a wavelength of one
micromicron, leave an infinitesimal fleck in photographs
of space where a star far larger than most exploded
lightyears from the Milky Way. The Milky Way
from out there is another fleck, adrift in the limitless
dark with galaxies flung in all directions, each
at its core having crushed into a pinhole several
million times the mass of the sun. When power
bears down, things get full of themselves sometimes
and send out bad vibes everywhere. One gamma burst
nearby, according to professors in Kansas, killed
most living things on Earth. But that was before
what we call consciousness, when living things
were small, and nobody cared. Lately, hydrogen
bombs make bad vibes too, and the atoms
are only a few gamma wavelengths across.
The poem about the war maintains that dropping
napalm on an innocent civilian is no less wrong
when you call your target the enemy aggressor.
My colleague and I agree. What we’ve got here,
Cool Hand Luke reminded the Walking Boss
(who promptly shot him dead), is a failure
to communicate. The poem blames smug
white men for bombing people said to be less
white, though it doesn’t mention gender or the color
of anyone’s skin. I met the poet in an elevator
when I was a mailboy where he taught, and his skin
had that pink tone of Angora cat lips, slightly muted.
The dazzle in his mind, prodigious then, is gone.
But poems of his, if you care to read them, come alive.