Maelstrom: One Drop Makes the Whole World Kin
All the world is one, like an angry deity’s essence dropped in
the ocean
becoming monstrous: what happens Mumbai happens Paris
What happens Vicenza U.S. Base or Prodi, Kyoto Accord, XL
Pipeline
advanced warplanes to Japan—what happens? Egypt, Yemen,
Syria
NASA’s five space probes or Aurora Borealis where we study
shimmering light
What happens on the Lunar New Year
I want to know, Professor, are there names for these mercurial
moves?
A lexicon & vibration touch the complexity of gestural motion
What happened with Augustine & his mother in Ostia?
I want to know what happens Nicea 325 perhaps God creates
the world!
Let’s go back and check this out: Ex nihilio ardore/splendore
Europe still riding the pull of Zeus a nuclear reactor not
dismantled
Heads coming off in cruelest acts, unspeakable
And how that is part of your story too—flooding in
Mozambique,
in Morocco, in Indonesia a part of you all suffering a part of
you
What happens Rwanda, Darfur, Chad, Ukraine, glaciers
shrinking what happens
when carbon-capped bombs fall on Natanz? on Bushehr
What is the poet’s job out of numbed slumber?
Entering post-poet-modernity I gave my larynx a workout
Started chanting for the redemption of Irreparable
Om Ah Hum for the Year of the Shy but Cunning Metal
Rabbit,
Inshallah O Peace Brutal Year of the Wooden Horse
The Gentle Sheep Year O Help us Now, Shalom Ah Hum,
Shanti
Copyright © 2015 by Anne Waldman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 16, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is a prayer or incantation for understanding the vicissitudes of the world’s perpetual (and more and more man-made), inflected chaos. The repeated question: ‘what happens?’ is perhaps a useless query. There is no stopping ‘what happens.’ All the poet can do is sound her complaint and awareness, naming trouble spots, calling on religious mantras to further sound the alarm. Praying for a more salutary New Year that will wake the world to itself.”
—Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman
A prominent figure in the Beat poetry generation, Anne Waldman has published over forty books of poetry and is the cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2011 to 2016.