protest poetry

Recently I wrote about what I am reading. I didn’t I mention that my favorite poetry is protest poetry. My favorite poet is Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This morning I read a really good poem (part of a poem, actually) of this genre in Poet’s Choice by Edward Hirsch (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006). It is a section of a poem by Saadi Youssef, “America, America,” from Without an Alphabet, Without a Face (translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa, Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002). Hirsch writes (p. 138) that Youssef wrote the poem “in 1995 in direct response to the hardship and suffering faced by the Iraqis under sanctions instigated by the United States.” I share it here:

 

 

  I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island

  and John Silver’s parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.

  I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham

       Lincoln’s dogs.

  I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia

       tobacco.

  But I am not American.

  Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone

       Age?

  I need neither oil nor America herself, neither the elephant nor the

       donkey.

  Leave me, pilot, leave my house roofed with palm fronds and this

       wooden bridge.

  I need neither your Golden Gate nor your skyscrapers.

  I need the village, not New York.

  Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed

       to the teeth?

  Why did you come all the way to distant Basra, where fish used to

       swim by our doorsteps?

  Pigs do not forage here.

  I have only these water buffaloes lazily chewing on water lilies.

  Leave me alone, soldier.

  Leave me my floating cane hut and my fishing spear.

  Leave me my migrating birds and the green plumes.

  Take your roaring iron birds and your Tomahawk missles. I am

       not your foe.

  I am the one who wades up to the knees in rice paddies.

  Leave me to my curse.

  I do not need your day of doom.

 

 

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