Roots

“All this has been driven largely by the sinking of roots.”—Thomas Halliday, Otherlands

A rhizosphere, or “world of roots,”*

underlies lives that rising raise

their arms toward a star that shoots

or rains down rays on which to graze.

The thralls of replicating life

so stuff themselves with solar meat,

and learn to thrust in mutual strife,

until, grown old in self-defeat,

their flesh is food that others eat,

and fuel a growing human swarm

will burn in winter to keep warm.

Those also have a rhizosphere,

although it’s what they have to fear,

with roots that murder growing near.

*Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (New York: Random House, 2023), on the Carboniferous era, 309 million years ago, p. 189.

No, no, Nunette!

Nun raises the sun out of Huh, primordial chaos, creating the world

Chorus: No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, Nanette.—No, No, Nanette (1924)

The Greeks say Night, Nyx,

first brought forth Eros (sex).

Egypt, however, attributes the task

of awakening Huh's todger

to Nun, whose front-office better half,

Nunette, deals with the wada-wada.

But presently, it seems, some asteroid

afire or other will crash

on whatever's left by then to smash,

Huh sitting sous vide, the cosmic catch,

and many a such bootless planetoid

murmurating in the outer void.

We'll have to start from scratch

again. Nunette gets so annoyed!

Note: "Nun can be seen as the first of all the gods and the creator of reality and personification of the cosmos. . . . Nun's consort (or his female aspect) was the goddess Nunut or Naunet."—https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu_(mythology)

Future Tense

Chaïm Soutine, Le poulet plumé /Plucked Chicken (1925), Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris

A hundred years from now,

if anything human still transpires then,

the IDF will be recalled in the same breath,

I suspect, as the Waffen SS.

Some may call this comparison obscene.

I call obscene the video on Instagram

showing a man holding a toddler with no head,

whose name, to which he would have answered in his toddler's way, was Ahmad—which means "Most Praiseworthy."

The bomb that killed him killed

his mother too—mercifully,

you might with a shudder think.

His father and two brothers lived

—the bomb droppers’ targeting,

it seems, was a little bit off that day.

Yes, this poem is obscene, too, I confess.

As any poem would necessarily be that evoked, for instance, Auschwitz and Babi Yar.

The one thing even more obscene, though,

is to pass over such things in silence.

For silence, don't they reckon, is consent?

See Anahid Nersessian, "Speaking the Unspeakable," review of [...] by Fady Joudah, New York Review of Books, October 17, 2024, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/10/17/speaking-the-unspeakable-fady-joudah/