New Strategy

*
Something Completely Different

Bring our soldiers home.
Use the 2 billion dollars per week
it costs us to foster genocide in Iraq
and slaughter American National Guard
troops that are needed at home,
whose deaths leave huge holes in
their families' lives forever,
to pay Iraqis to rebuild their
homeland, lives, society,
government.

Fill the market places,
town squares, courtyards, schools
and public meeting places
of Iraq with cash, household items,
bricks, boards, building supplies,
concrete, good food, water purification
tablets, generators --
do this until every person in the country
has what they need to build back
his or her own life.

Instead of death squads
and imbedded assassins, sneak
carpentry materials into neighborhoods
under cover of darkness, bags of toys,
books, flour, olive oil, chick peas, lentils,
tomatoes, potatoes, onions, dill, yogurt,
lower goats and cows from Apache helicopters,
clean clothing, shoes, telephones.

Do this in the name of Jesus, Allah,
Yewah, Buddha, Lord Shiva, Quan Yin,
The Virgin Mary.

Do it in the name of sanity.
Do it until Iraqi people have time
put their country back together.

This would save billions of dollars,
and lives, even the planet.
Neo-cons can't count forward.

It costs more to kill people
than to fix a house,
more to fill children's bodies with
shrapnel than secure school houses,
more to fill a young mind with hate
than science.

Bring our soldiers home.
Give the money it costs to keep
them in Iraq to the Iraqis
to fix their country.

Quit trying to rock and roll
with a square wheel.


©Susan Bright, 2006


Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.

* Image from The Design Council, UK

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