"Hilt's Law" by Jacob Rakovan

Poem of the Week:    Jacob Rakovan                                      Hilt's Law     The bones cast in the field like seed corn grow nothing, grow briars in the boarded gas stations brown stalks ready for the fire. You do not hear our song, earth thick in our throats, benzene, chromium cadmium and arsenic shuttered stores, hosts of dead in cold-mill towns the day that does not come though prayed for. The trains of coal and corpses, the price of power though wires are stretched like a mandolin on our backs though the saints bob above us like car-lot balloons You do not hear our singing. In electric light the bubble gum machine is full of teeth the babies' bottles with a slow sweet poison the air thick with cancer, the rain with teeth, without flowers, without cease. This dream of sleep, in hunter's orange over oil-black in cups, in the hollows under eyes. The unborn sun in the darkest river, the hollow hills unsong of un-place, Bloody Harlan, Centralia the blessed fly over in air conditioned comfort.      Let the bone-fire of your city burn 'till your shadow stains.....the bricks  Let the dark come spilling from the mine thick as molasses Let the end come if it is coming, Let the rich hang from their ankles, a washtub full of black blood. You do not hear. Let the hills and stones fall on us and cover us Let those curse us who curse the day, who are skillful the smelters of iron, and armaments, the hilltop removers. Though we are dying, though we breath black dust and blue powder, spit liquor and blood the black drink, the earth's secret breath. Though we are toothless, though we are blind we hear this: Steady trundle of the train under storm clouds loaded down with malediction, the radio tower's Babel-bleat to heaven with the black stone, with the dead for burning  song of electric light, and sleeplessness. Weariest river at the end of all things  We follow you into the earth. -Jacob Rakovan  Used by permission. Jacob Rakovan is an Appalachian writer in diaspora. He is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry and recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The James Dickey Review, Anon, Thrush and Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism as well as anthologies by Salmon Poetry Press, MTV Books and The Arsenic Lobster. His manuscript The Devil's Radio was a finalist for the 2012 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature and the Gell poetry prize and is forthcoming on Small Doggies Press. He is co-curator of the Poetry & Pie Night reading series in Rochester, New York.  Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of theWeek widely. We just ask you to include all of theinformation in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.

Poem of the Week Open Call   Split This Rock began the Poem of the Week program in October 2009 as a way of publicizing the poets who were to be featured in the 2010 festival. We have since continued the series by featuring the work of participants of our festivals. We are pleased to open the call up to any poet writing in the socially engaged vein -- festival participant or not.    Visit our blog for specifics and submission guidelines.  We look forward to reading your work! Support Split This Rock  Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

Blue Scarf Solidarity Project

The Cleveland Nonviolence Network has invited Buddy Bell to Cleveland from April 4 to April 10, 2013 to speak about the Blue Scarf Solidarity Project with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers.  A
 
Please plan to attend the following Blue Scarf Solidarity events with Buddy Bell, co-coordinator of Voice for Creative Nonviolence: 

Free and Open to the Public--
*April 4, 2013 at 7:00 PM--Continuing Dr. King's Legacy--North Presbyterian Church, 4515 Superior Avenue (new address—parking in lot across the street) Cleveland, OH 44103.  (Speaking—Buddy Bell of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and Veronica Dahlberg, Director of HOLA);
Primary Contacts:  Charlie Hurst and Maria Smith, email:  caixa@prodigy.net. 
 
*April 5, 2013 at 6:00 PM--potluck; 7:00 PM Buddy Bell’s presentation to the West Shore Unitarian Imagine Peace Group, West Shore Unitarian Church, 20401 Hilliard Blvd, Rocky River, OH. 

Primary Contacts:  Jean Kosmac, email:  kosmac.jean@gmail.com; Patt Needham,
email ahimsa.p@gmail.com. 
 
*April 7, 2013 at 12:00 Noon—John Knox Presbyterian Church, 25200 Lorain Rd. North Olmsted, OH 44070.  Primary Contacts:  Jeff Nichols at 440.777.3744 or jnichols@johnknoxpc.org, and Maria Smith, email: 
caixa@prodigy.net.  
 
Please plan to attend the first local conversation with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers:  
*April 13, 2013 at 9:30 AM--Skype/audio conversation with the Afghan Youth Peace

Volunteers, West Shore Unitarian Imagine Peace Group, West Shore Unitarian Church, 20401 Hilliard Blvd, Rocky River, OH. 

Buddy Bell and Kathy Kelly are co-coordinators of Voice for Creative Nonviolence.  He visited the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers twice last year, spending a total to two months with them.  He plans to return to Afghanistan at the end of this summer. 

If you would like to invite Buddy Bell to speak at a gathering, please contact
Maria Smith at caixa@prodigy.net .  
Primary Contacts:  Jean Kosmac, email:  kosmac.jean@gmail.com; Patt Needham,
email ahimsa.p@gmail.com. 

"The SS American Star" by Glenn Shaheen, from Predatory

THE SS AMERICAN STAR by Glenn Shaheen, from Predatory

Somewhere a house in which a thousand dreams

were born burns to the ground. The family is inside

and dies. Or they're away

at dinner, returning to embers. The point is, many

of those dreams involved this house, its rooms, all the love

that could flood its halls. Now,

ash. Actually, we should start

smaller. Somewhere a treehouse in which ten dreams

were born burns to the ground.

                        Or a woman enters a room

in the middle of a lecture and everybody turns

to see her, expecting to be astonished. A sea of heads

in one smooth wave.

But she is nobody special. She has recently

had her heart broken. Who hasn't? This is not

glamorous.

                        Years ago, the SS American Star

was one of the premiere cruise ships in the world.

Thousands of people rode her all over the Atlantic,

the Pacific. Celebrities. Lottery winners.

Couples blowing some of their savings. Their love

in winded tatters. Or newlyweds. Their lives

smooth glass. And singles. There was much sex and dance.

Many hoped to book

a room on the ship one day. But the ship fell apart. Bit by bit. The paint

went, and pipes. The bones couldn't hold

the skin. Passengers stopped. The ship began to haul cold

freight. Metals. Oil. Eventually, a storm wrecked

the ship at Fuertaventura, off the coast of Africa,

in shallow waters. It broke in half, two hundred yards

from shore. And it still sits, rusted, gutted of former thoughts

and the buzz of ghosts, just

off shore. The townspeople ignore it. In Arkansas,

a high school social studies teacher explains to her students that everything

they adore in life has been earned by military

action. Some amount of flame and metal has bought

all the knick knacks and meals they need

for everyday living. They realize

that this is a source for intense pride. All thirty kids breathe in

at once. This creates the smallest fluctuation

in the pressure of the classroom

killing millions of tiny germs and bacteria all housed

in the hot crevices

of their skin, invisible to the naked eye.

http://glennshaheen.com/

"Kill Anything That Moves" Guest Review by Michael True

Nick Turse, "Kill Anything That Moves:  The Real American War in Vietnam."  New York:  Metropolitan, 2013.   355 pp.

The title of Nick Turse’s brilliant history, Kill Anything That Moves, was a commanding officer’s response to a soldier’s question, “Are we supposed to kill women and children?”

 In contrast, an army criminal investigator’s response to a veteran who revealed that American soldiers were abusing and killing Vietnamese civilians:  “The United States has never condoned wanton killing or disregard for human life.”

Turse’s readable, indispensable, and, yes, deeply disturbing book may be the most important book among  thousands of books about the Vietnam war. A major achievement is its explaining how and why “atrocities perpetrated by U.S. soldiers have essentially vanished from public memory.” In authenticity and power, it compares favorably with earlier  accounts, such as Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried,  and Bruce Weigl’s poems, Song of Napalm.

Titles of the early chapters of Turse’s book convey a general sense of the grim and tragic accounts of the war: “A System of Suffering,” “Overkill,” “A Litany of Atrocities,” and “Unbound Misery.”   In the process, the author documents the commander’s standard operating procedure, including burying bad news, concealing violations of military law,  and papering over miscarriages of justice.

In training before going to Vietnam, soldiers were schooled in racist language referring to the Vietnamese as “gooks, soldiers were taught to regard Vietnamese as inferior, even inhuman, referring to them not as “the enemy,” but as “gooks”  or “dinks.”   This practice reflected the contempt with which the country was regarded by President Johnson, who called Vietnam “a piddling piss-ant little country,” as well as Robert McNamara who referred to it as a “backward nation; Henry Kissinger called a fourth-rate or fifth-rate power.
In a representative account of civilians victimized by the troops, a mother returning home came upon the bodies of her son and two others riddled with bullets. They had been tending the family ducks, while their mother was away for a brief period.  Encouraged to raise the body count in this way, one soldier amassed an estimated 1500 enemy killed-in-action, by planting Chinese communist grenades on  bodies so that they would be counted as enemy dead..

A particularly chilling, though not unrepresentative, account of an “industrial-scale slaughter” involved a two-star general. As field commander in the Mekong Delta, he “made the killing of civilians into standard operating procedure.”  In an early briefing, he announced his plan “to begin killing 4,000, then 6,000 a month “of these little bastard” then went on from there.  As an associate said of another officer, for him, “body count was everything.”

Reasonable estimates account for 3.8 million violent war deaths, combatant and civilian, according to reports by Harvard Medical School and Institute for Health Metrics and Education report.  An official 1995 Vietnamese government report estimated more than 3 million deaths, a million of them civilians. Civilian victims of the war included
8,000-16,000 South Vietnamese paraplegics; 30,000-60,000 South Vietnamese left blind, and 83,000 to 166,000 South Vietnam amputees.  These estimates do not include the tens of thousands of  Americans and North Vietnamese dead and wounded

Some information about atrocities, though  “prematurely closed and buried,” was assembled by “Conduct of the War in Vietnam” (COWIN),  a task force established by the top commander in Vietnam and later army chief of staff, General Westmoreland. In what Turse describes as a “whitewash of a report,” it concluded that “criminal acts that occurred during General Westmoreland’s tenure in Vietnam…were neither wide-spread nor extensive enough to render him criminally responsible for their commission.”

More recently, other government officials have re-branded or dispatched the Vietnam war to the dustbin of history.  Their re-writing of history perpetuates misleading accounts by reporters and irresponsible editors who ignored or withheld essential information from the beginning of American involvement in 1965.

In spite of efforts to silence them and to deprive the public of an accurate account of the war, many veterans, at considerable risk, gave detailed accounts of their own involvement and the policies that led to various war crimes.  In twelve years of research—reading files and interviewing witnesses, Turse documented their  testimonies.  It included Jamie Henry’s testimony, at a press conference in 1970, that the murders at My Lai was only one of similar incidents that occurred “on a daily basis and differ from one another only in terms of numbers killed.”

The perspective that Turse brings to this history is truly a gift to public discourse. “Never having come to grips with what our country did during the Vietnam war,” he says, “ we see its ghost arise anew with every successive intervention.”  In the conclusion, he asks questions that offer a means to our understanding its full implications, and other wars that followed:  “Was Iraq the new Vietnam?  Or was that Afghanistan?  Do we see ‘light at the end of the tunnel.’  Are we winning ‘hearts and minds.” Is ‘counterinsurgency’ working? Are we applying ‘the lessons of Vietnam’?  What are those lessons anyway.”

An obvious answer to these questions might be that those responsible for U.S. foreign policy never met a war they didn’t like.  In spite of that fact, as Andrew Bacevich said, the Pentagon hasn’t won a war since 1945.

One wishes that every American citizen might read Kill Everything That Moves, and take to heart its account of a brutal, unnecessary war and the evil that that we were responsible for.  Sadly, we continue to be lied to about the full implications of U.S. foreign policy that undermine democratic governance.
                                                                                                        --Michael True

Melissa Tuckey's "Dick Cheney's New Heart Speaks"

Poem of the Week:    Melissa Tuckey                                    Dick Cheney's New Heart Speaks     A roadside bomb is planted in every chest I was a pea sized fist in the dirt of a man who had half your brains but he was good The heart does not relinquish its domain Your blood confesses to every crime Don't expect me to be patient with you Your DNA has struck a compromise with the purgatory of souls Your fingerprints engraved with names of the dead Have a seat Mr. Cheney while your skin reads its final testimony -Melissa Tuckey Used by permission. Melissa Tuckey is author of Tenuous Chapel, selected by Charles Simic for the ABZ Press first book prize (May 2013) and Rope As Witness (Pudding House Press, 2007). Her honors and awards include a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Winter Fellowship, and writing fellowships from DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Ohio Arts Council, as well as a residency at Blue Mountain Center.  Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Weekwidely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.

Poem of the Week Open Call   Split This Rock began the Poem of the Week program in October 2009 as a way of publicizing the poets who were to be featured in the 2010 festival. We have since continued the series by featuring the work of participants of our festivals. We are pleased to open the call up to any poet writing in the socially engaged vein -- festival participant or not.    Visit our blog for specifics and submission guidelines.  We look forward to reading your work!

Support Split This Rock  Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

Split This Rock  www.SplitThisRock.org  202-787-5210  info@splitthisrock.org

Poetry Reading April 8th, 7pm: Dave Lucas, Catherine Wing, and some other dude

“small kidnaps in the dark”: Anne Carson’s Nox (Guest Review by Paige Webb)

“small kidnaps in the dark”: Anne Carson’s Nox

Review by Paige Webb

“Look!” I said, unfolding Nox for my son and for weeks to anyone who came by: an unbound, accordion style fold of a book preserved in an austere box.  It is an elegy or epitaph for her brother, Michael, who she scarcely knew and died unexpectedly in Denmark.  But Nox is more than a performance of grieving, it is a translation.  Anne Carson is, after all, a translator, though here she attempts to translate a person, a history, her grief.

            

Without a physical spine, what binds Nox is “Catullus 101”: on nearly each left-hand fold Carson translates and defines each successive word in the Latin poem, definitions of breadth, offering not only the full periphery of each word, but also Carson’s poetic phrases as usage examples.  These definitions both speak to and juxtapose the more personal entries on the right—a letter, a photo, an anecdote.

            

Because Carson often presses against the boundaries of genre (her “short-talks” are poetry, but she calls them lectures; Autobiography of Red is a Novel in Verse; The Beauty of the Husband is an Essay in 29 Tangos), I was not surprised to see Nox pushing against what constitutes a book, as a single long folded sheet, or against what constitutes a book of poetry, with its entries of prose, definitions, and only snips of “poetic” phrases.  Nox veers in that it is starkly personal: even in The Beauty of the Husband the autobiographical is mitigated through the poetic.  In Nox, she offers more of a factual history, plainly transcribed, with actual letters and photographs, as if she must begin proper translation with the most primary of sources.  

            

To translate Michael, Carson starts with history.  She invokes the first historian, Herodotus, as she searches the what-happened-and-why of her brother, a search to find “an account that makes sense . . . a lock against oblivion.”  But she quickly presents the futility in history, in asking.

when Herodotos endeavors to find out from them the size of the Skythian population, [they] point to a bowl that stands at Exampaios.  It is made of the melted down arrowheads required of each Skythian by their king Ariantes on pain of death. 

We can gather facts, but we can never know what the facts we gather mean. 

            

Still, Carson can’t avoid trying to know.  Michael becomes “overtakenlessness”: “that which cannot be got round.  Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of.”  So we see frustrated scratches (“WHO WERE YOU”) repeating forcibly down the page.  Desire, as usual with Carson, becomes the subject; she cannot avoid or fulfill the want to comprehend her brother, her connection to him, the meaning of his life and death—“He does not end.”

            

And Carson places us in the search, unfolding the history.  Nox physically unfolds as we read and as we read we progressively receive more information.  On one page we see a fragmented letter from Michael, only some half-phrases; below this, an account of events (labeled 2.2): He ran away instead of going to jail, he sent a few post cards, he changed his name, he only wrote one letter (the letter we partially see).  The next three pages repeat this structure, presenting different sections of the same letter (we gain it piece by piece, but never the whole) and the expository 2.2 section, verbatim (the facts do not change, only our understanding of them)—except the last is cut off, as if run, off center, from a copy machine.  The facts do not change, and as we gather more we do not necessarily understand more.

   

Facts do not explain meaning, the why, so Carson translates, but this only offers “little kidnaps in the dark”: snatches of meaning she pieces together in a “room [she] can never leave . . . composed entirely of entries.”  Continually she enters her brother’s shadow, his night, recording each entry she gathers:

What if you made a collection of lexical entries, as someone who is asked to come up with a      number for the population of the Skythians might point to bowl at Exampaios.

She culls small kidnaps of Michael’s night, transforming them into entries, into Nox.  And Nox is purposefully fragmented, imperfect; like the Catullus poem which translation fails, Carson ultimately does not show that she can translate Michael’s life or her emotions about his death, but only that she can attempt.  And the existence of Nox asserts meaning in the attempt.

            

Talking to a friend about this book, he mentioned all the ripped letters and photographs: the probability that Carson destroyed them to create Nox, or the original it copies.  We can’t know why she tore pieces of her brother’s history, whether for personal or poetic reasons, and whether the two, here, can be separated.  It does seem necessary, however, for her to deconstruct “Catullus 101,” progressively, through her definitions and through the tea stained version of the whole that turns from Latin to English, from torn to indecipherable.  Perhaps to attempt an entry into meaning, she must rend the pieces she has to configure the whole. 

            

And it is the whole configuration that strikes: how Carson physically reconstructs the frustrated search for meaning, the clarity in her awareness of this process and its uncertainty, the courage (or forfeit?) of the last ave, or farewell—all creates a deeply felt and acutely conscious pathos. 

             

Jericho Brown brings it.

Poem of the Week:    Jericho Brown                                  'N'em     They said to say goodnight And not goodbye, unplugged The TV when it rained. They hid Money in mattresses So to sleep on decisions. Some of their children Were not their children. Some Of their parents had no birthdates. They could sweat a cold out Of you. They'd wake without An alarm telling them to. Even the short ones reached Certain shelves. Even the skinny Cooked animals too quick To get caught. And I don't care How ugly one of them arrived, That one got married To somebody fine. They fed Families with change and wiped Their kitchens clean. Then another century came. People like me forgot their names. -Jericho Brown Used by permission. Jericho Brown was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and once worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, Brown is an Assistant Professor at Emory University. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including The American Poetry Review, jubilat, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Tin House,The Best American Poetry, and 100 Best African American Poems. His first book, PLEASE, won the American Book Award. Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Weekwidely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks! If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.

Poem of the Week Open Call   Split This Rock began the Poem of the Week program in October 2009 as a way of publicizing the poets who were to be featured in the 2010 festival. We have since continued the series by featuring the work of participants of our festivals. We are pleased to open the call up to any poet writing in the socially engaged vein -- festival participant or not.    Visit our blog for specifics and submission guidelines.  We look forward to reading your work!

Support Split This Rock  Please support Split This Rock, the national network of activist poets. Donations are fully tax-deductible.  Click here to donate. Or send a check payable to "Split This Rock" to: Split This Rock, 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Many thanks! Contact info@splitthisrock.org for more details or to become a sponsor.

Split This Rock  www.SplitThisRock.org  202-787-5210  info@splitthisrock.org

Gate poems by Deema Shehabi!

Gate of Freedom by Deema K. Shehabi Lovers of asparagus, alive  as hummingbirds, place their nostrils over a low cloud, wet of air. It's the year of green hills in California that early spring; the evening is blue-split between the first snow on the mountain top, and a computer screen, where news of a man whose body is eating itself, scythes the long-stemmed breaths in the room. "Do not weep if my heart fails," he writes. "I am your son." Gate of Love Son I have. Your hands bulge with pear tree blossoms. You are bellow and sweat, hunger and bread. I part the fog to find you through a grimy crowd of kids. Before you give in to the affection that soils you in public, I'll promise you a truce. Gate of the Sun Bristling down the chemical-  scraped hall uttering  assalamu alaikums to the young  patients from the UAE, their heads sagging    to the side, their bodies a shrine  to tumors, husks of overgrown cells,  the chemo fountain. One boy  stares through a sieve  of darkness, hewn around dark-gray clouds. Gate of Peace "I have so many sons withering,"  I whisper to the Chinese elm, as news  of the man whose body is eating itself,  disputes with the bresola on crisp baguette  that I'm eating in a garden among the flung-out  blue jays and limping Daddy long legs.  No hymns left;  only a small neck  the sun gnarls through.

Tommy Sands at John Carroll! March 14th, 7pm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tommy Sands Legendary Singer, Songwriter, and Peace Activist, March 14 at John Carroll University ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Join us for an evening of Irish music and storytelling from the legendary Tommy Sands. He will perform his new program, "Arising From The Troubles: Through the Eyes of a Troubadour, A Northern Ireland Perspective." This historical program, through story and song, revolves around the conflict in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants. The message of this program is overcoming division, and seeking peace within differences. Sponsored by John Carroll University's Center for Global Education, and the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program. Thursday, March 14, 7-9 pm, Dolan Center for Science & Technology, Donahue Auditorium. John Carroll students may attend for free. General public $15. Visit the Center for Global Education for more information. Phone: 1.216.397.4320. Fax:1.216.397.1847. VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR NEWS MAINSTREAM MEDIA IGNORES Join Cleveland Peace Action or renew your membership online quickly and securely via PayPal - click here Online donors will make a tax-deductible donation to the Cleveland Peace Action Education Fund.

Contact Information ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ email: clevelandpeaceaction@gmail.com phone: 216-231-4245 web: http://www.peaceactioncleveland.org/

"Hearing of Alia Muhammed Baker's Stroke"

Poem of the Week:   

Philip Metres            

                

    

Hearing of Alia Muhammed Baker's Stroke  

How a Basra librarian
could haul the books each night,
load by load, into her car,

the war ticking like a clock
about to wake. Her small house
swimming in them. How, the British

now crossing the limits
of Basra, the neighbors struck
a chain to pass the bags of books

over the wall, into a restaurant,
until she could bring them all,
like sandbags, into her home,

some thirty thousand of them,
before the library, and her brain,
could finally flood into flame.

-Philip Metres

Used by permission.


Philip Metres has written a number of books and chapbooks, most recently A Concordance of Leaves (Diode 2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine 2011), which was the winner of the 2012 Arab American Book Award, To See the Earth(Cleveland State 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941(University of Iowa 2007). His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize.  He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Philip blogs at http://behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all ofthe information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.