The Whore Named War

POETRY FORMAT, 3 Jul 2017

Gary Corseri – TRANSCEND Media Service

The Whore named War
lassoed the President,
let him lay
in lascivious arms;

while the Ministers
and the Secretary
and the People
gawked
in violaceous light
she made them come
over and over and over.

Though they hated her
runny-mascara, caking-rouge
mawkish montage,
they loved how she raked
long finger-claws
over clavicles and genitals,
drawing their blood.

She cast spells with the nettles of her hair,
whispered their names with her sulfurous breath
and they echoed hers back
like drunken sleep-walkers.

They loved her more
than the arms of peace
their wives held out to them,
better than the kisses of their children;

they praised the medals
she pinned in their flesh,
fondled her hands
soaked in fear’s urine.

She sent them to mesmerizing lands
where they learned:

mother, father,
wife and brother,
axioms of teachers,
ministries of healing—
naught; all … naught!

They heard her voice
in the desert sirocco;
in Everywhere’s sun
saw her eyes’ anvil;

felt
the shroud of her breath
in the moon of forgetting.

Their nights were green and their eyes feral,
searching mosques and alleys for video monsters,
in death-strewn arcades full of cliches.

The Whore’s V.D. contagioned the nation,
spewed pus from politicians’ mouths,
prattling mewlishly of duty and honor.
Preachers lavished gifts of diamonds and pearls
and fools heaped ostuaries
to “The Greater Cause.”

Her laughter frothed their putrescent lips,
broiled their brains in the basins of skulls.
They loved the rancid milk of her tits,
the hydra-heads of her teeth-lined loins.

To lie closer, they folded their plicate wings,
ate blood and shit and the sweat of each other,
retched their names in history’s spittoon,
lay blear-eyed, dreamed-out, dreamless at last.

_______________________________________________

Dr. Gary Steven Corseri is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment. He has published and posted articles, fiction and poems at hundreds of venues, including, TMS (Transcend Media Service), The New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook Magazine and Counterpunch.  He has published 2 novels and 2 collections of poetry, and his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere.  He has performed his poems at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum and has taught in universities in the US and Japan, and in US public schools and prisons.  Contact: Gary_Corseri@comcast.net.

 

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 3 Jul 2017.

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4 Responses to “The Whore Named War”

  1. Edward Curtin says:

    Wow! Here’s a poem that is worth 100 anti-war tracks. It’s a powerful indictment of the erotic nature of the embrace of death by national leaders and voyeuristic followers. Hats off to Gary.

  2. Barbara Millar says:

    I liked the metaphor of The Whore as a vampire sucking blood (and its timely allusion to Mika’s vampire facelift) used as a distraction from Trump’s plummeting approval rate. Without gorging on the blood of war, the vampire dies. Like war, the vampire is another murderer sucking life out life, randomly and unpredictably, like the sword of Damocles over a nation. The words blood lust come to mind as locusts lust for food, leaving nothing behind.

  3. Gary Corseri. says:

    Thanks for your comments, Ed and Barbara.

    I will mention here, Barbara, that my allusions are general. Men, and women, too, have been fascinated by the “whore of war” for millennia. You have no doubt heard of the “whore of Babylon” in the Bible? What is the sickness within that makes the horrors of war something to “celebrate”? How narrowly we define “heroism” as a means to wreak havoc and endure and perpetrate violence for the sake of “freedom,” or “honor,” or “just following orders”!

    I try to avoid ad hominems and the personalization of politics. Those are endless games. I have bigger fish to fry.

  4. Random Reader says:

    I find it difficult to enjoy the piece because of the association of war with a woman here. Very difficult. It is an aggregated self serving administrative mechanism to maximise expediency at the cost of life. Nothing very feminin about it. Equating the aptly described horrendous attributes of war with feminin… things or traits or what have you…. very disturbing Gary. And no i am not an ultrafeminist or anything of the kind. Just a random guy tired of the random hate. all of it. of any kind.