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CounterPunch
November
16, 2002
Israeli Commandant Meets the
Press.
by SYNDEY BERNARD SMITH
[October 2000. When asked why his men
shot stone-throwing Palestinian children, Israeli officer said
"What else can we do?"]
What can we do? asks Zion's head of Ops.
They lurk in slums, like cockroaches or rats;
they waste no water washing, grow no crops,
& dig no wells; they throw their pebbles at us,
they dance in rage; they're savages; they're spoiled;
need to be taught a lesson. We are few.
We must defend our tanks. That deadly child!
A stone? We shoot him. What else can we do?
Sydney Bernard Smith lives in Dundalk, Ireland and can
be reached at: sydneybernard@esatclear.ie
We The People
by ADAM ENGEL
We the people
without will or politics
are tired
the clock is hemorrhaging
We the people
the little ones, provoked
are tired:
Time
goes on and on
what can we the people do
who can change nothing
what can we the people do
but live on and on
until we end we
the people can go on
for a while we
the people can go on if
Time will let us
on and on
until we
end
Adam Engel
lives and writes in NYC. He can be reached at asengel@attglobal.net
Twin Poets
by MURRAY DAILEY
I came across your laundry,
thinkin i had somethin left to smoke,
like standing in broad daylight,
your hands around my throat.
I saw you in the background,
with your skeleton and your drugs,
like i was standing outside of Eden,
and looking like a thug.
I held you in contempt,
while your innocent side fled,
like gods rolling out their carpets,
I always took you for dead.
I put you in a chamber,
of a heart like a loaded gun,
after chasing down those butterflys,
I see the rain has just begun.
Murray Dailey
is an environmentalist, poet and comic from Michigan. He can
be reached at: Murphwild1@aol.com
Days Like This One
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Fumbling around on Sunday
morning after a smoky night
of blues and sour beer
and time moves in fits
and false starts,
trying to regear.
Even the most routine
motions--grinding
a scoop of coffee
beans, unsheathing
the bulky paper
from its wrap,
stabs at civil exchange--
seem vaguely unfamiliar,
rendered down
to mere instinct
and a few glazed
over images.
Kimberly passes
the day flipping
through Wallace Stevens,
like a sheaf
of twenty-dollar bills,
as if those poems
might be bribed
into motion.
Outside the rain skims
across tall blonde grasses,
a November drizzle,
just a breath away
from freezing,
and harsh enough
to sting the skin--
as I scan the sky
for hawks.
But on days like this one
the raptors hunker down,
rigid on fenceposts of black
locust, one after another,
across the tilted fields--
passing measures
for the land--
their shoulders
hunched like linebackers,
waiting to close on
the slightest opening
in the unsettled rhythm
of the day.
Yesterday's Features
Anthony Gancarski
Disarming
Christian Soldiers
Kurt Nimmo
Crimes
Plotted in Windowless Rooms:
Into the Bush Imperium
Tom Barry
Frontier
Justice
From TR to Bush
Robert Fisk
Bin Laden:
Back and in Saudi Arabia?
Chris Floyd
Taking
the Fifth
Bush's Extremist Agenda Goes into Overdrive
Tarif Abboushi
The Political Theology of Tom Delay:
Advocating Crimes Against Humanity?
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- The Shafts of Death: Bush, Coal Mines, and Death
in the Tunnels;
- Speak Memory!: Carter and the Draft;
- Daniel Pipes' World: Smearing Pro-Arab Academics;
- Ashcroft's Gays: the War on Free Speech;
- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
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