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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2005 : Walter Bargen
ZOONOTIC
Caged, toothless, a lion sits in the manner of Kabul
alley cats, front paws slightly curled inward
toward his chest, hind legs folded close to his body,
head erect, staring beyond what moves beyond the bars.
Marjan's mane mangled from a grenade tossed
five years ago that killed his mate.
He'd mauled the victorious fighter who'd entered
his enclosure to celebrate, lion to lion.
He survives revenge and today's war,
gunfire and guided bombs. Near starvation,
he gums the flank of something tossed to him.
Alley cats steal in to steal choice pieces.
From neglect, old age, he dies.
Ten years earlier, Kuwait City evacuated,
desert-hued walls shrapnel-riddled,
hippos, big as burnt-out Mercedes,
wandered the streets. Sharks, more or less lucky,
pulled from algae-festering aquariums,
eaten by the invading army.
A confused giraffe stared into
a flashing traffic light. Cages opened,
toucan and parrots perched on bullets.
At the city limits, steel-latticed stems
of a hundred desert derricks
sabotaged into unfurling black blooms.
Half-a-century earlier,
by order of the Japanese army,
at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo,
shortly before the flash and ash
of Hiroshima and Nagazaki,
the cages left open, tigers, leopards,
bears, snakes, all poisoned.
Three elephants, John, Tonky, and Wanly,
wouldn't eat the poisoned potatoes.
The syringes' needles too weak
to pierce their skins. Seventeen days later,
John starved to death. Tonky and Wanly,
weak and thin, lifted their bony bodies,
stood on their hind legs, raising
their trunks as high as they could,
performing their bonsai trick,
begging for food, for water.
No one said a word. No one said
their trainer went mad giving
them what they needed.
Everyone prayed for one more day
that tomorrow the bombing would end.
Two weeks later, they died, trunks stretched,
hooked high between the bars of their cage.
If that prayed for time exists,
perhaps my father found it,
mowing the lawn, raking leaves,
finishing the basement with cheap
wood paneling, washing and waxing
a series of cars, a shine maintained
between wars. My mother kept
some of the bowling trophies,
emptied the closets of his clothes,
gave away all the shoes except
his traditional German dance clogs,
the ones with a military spit-shine.
I kept the patches, the chevrons,
insignias, medals, flags,
the photographs. His leather belts,
I could wrap around me twice.
One cut of gray, wrinkled
elephant skin, stamped authentic
as death must be.
This poem won an Honorable Mention in the 2005 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Author Walter Bargen received a $75 award. Copyright is reserved to the author. Read
Jendi Reiter's critique of this poem.
About Walter Bargen
Walter Bargen has published nine books and two chapbooks of poems: Fields of Thenar (Singing Wind Press, 1980), Mysteries in the Public Domain (BkMk Press, UMKC, 1990), Yet Other Waters (Timberline Press, 1990), and The Vertical River (Timberline Press, 1995), Rising Water: Reflections on the Year of the Great Flood (Pekitanoui Publications, 1994), the chapbook At The Dead Center Of Day (BkMk Press, UMKC, 1997), Water Breathing Air (Timberline Press, 1999), Harmonic Balance (Timberline Press 2001), Vow of Hunger (Snark Publishing, 2003), The Body of Water (Timberline Press, 2003) and The Feast: Prose Poem Sequences (BkMk Press-UMKC, 2004). The Feast won the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award for best poetry book by a Missouri writer. His tenth book, Remedies for Vertigo (WordTech Communications), is scheduled for publication in fall of 2006.
His poetry and fiction have appeared in over one hundred magazines, including American Literary Review, American Letters & Commentary, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blue Mesa Review, Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, International Quarterly, Iowa Review, Melic Review, Missouri Review, New Letters, New Novel Review, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, River Styx, Seattle Review, Seneca Review, Sycamore Review, and Witness. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship (1991); winner of the Quarter After Eight Prose Prize (1995), the St. Louis Poetry Center's Stanley Hanks Prize (1996), and the Chester H. Jones Foundation poetry prize (1997).
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