Short Decades of International Conflict
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Short Decades of International Conflict
by KJ Hannah Greenberg
Short tens earlier, convoys built from army jeeps, NGO funding,
Medical practitioners’ ideals, consumers’ discarded survival equipment,
Melded intrigue, even party planning for large delegations, into utterly nice
Guard posts meant to keep out spokesmen schooled in pandering “high virtue,”
Rather than refer primary sources to truths international strictures usually permitted.
Schooners, long land locked because of would-be princes’ perpetrated guile,
(They owed dukes quondam distribution of land rights, hash, cashes of silent movies),
Spun to ends unmentionable even as bands tweeted sousaphone marches, ornamenting
Desert air slick with burnished musical compounds, media-peddled cultural imports, also
Less-than-playful foreign notions of valleys’ entitlement, settlements parameters, water sharing.
It’s not the sex shops in Tel Aviv, not secular beliefs, even edgy attributes,
That attach purpose to flying nixies in keffiyehs; careful deconstruction proves,
Time and again, how convergent events’ calculated portrayal feeds most hungry raptors.
Decades of awaiting vessels’ “passage” beneath draw bridges, other intended institutions,
Actualizes planetary bait and hook, makes mincemeat of Galil waters, Golan plains, families.
It’s crazy; national representatives blame us denizens for all parts of global trouble!
Consider our misfortunes of diction, underwrought time management, besotted corpses,
See phenomena’s full array as urban ravens, limit blame to folks wearing pants, although
Elsewhere, piracy’s full frontal nudity robs sovereigns, produces sterile thoughts, takes life,
Satisfies crude, calculating fat cats selling children arsenic, or otherwise slaying chaste souls.
Stanza by stanza.
The first uses military maneuvering as a metaphor: “convoys” of a self-serving ideology moving in “short tens [decades] earlier” on populations to keep out the truth, apparently of their greedy motives.
The second further defines this concept as “media-peddled cultural imports” combined with “foreign notions of…entitlement,” specifically “water rights,”
an infiltration of values and power.
The third portrays outright warfare in terms of D&G “nixies” wearing “keffiyehs,”
the scarves worn by desert people in the Mideast, “hungry raptors…making “mincemeat” [ravaging] the “Golan plains,” if not the Heights.
The fourth blames other nations for blaming the Mideast for “all parts of global trouble” when it seems that foreign intervention [“piracy”] is the culprit, robbing true sovereigns of their rights, engineering mass mind control, and committing atrocities.
Yet one can see this grisly picture mirroring all international conflict.