What
You're Missing in our subscriber-only CounterPunch newsletter
CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS
Peter Kwong
gives us the "New China" without illusions: from the
"millionaires' fair" in Shanghai, with $60,000 diamond-studded dog leashes
to one
of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on
the planet. How China's
leaders swapped Marx and Mao for Milton Friedman. Alexander Cockburn
on What's wrong with the U.S. left.
They're sitting in darkened rooms weaving conspiracy fantasies
about 9/11; they're blogging; they're confusing a medium with
a movement; they're not doing enough to stop the war in Iraq.
John Ross
takes us along the stormy trail of the Mexican election. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers
each month! But
remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the
print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription
to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find
anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
Every Iraqi knows
there are lions in the desert.
And by now, every Iraqi knows
the American soldiers stalked Abeer like lions,
in a pack,
the leaders among them taking the first bites
of her fifteen-year old flesh.
A U.S. official called it
a "crime of opportunity,"
but every Iraqi knows they stalked her
as Cheney and Rumsfeld stalked Iraq,
crouching behind lies the size of boulders,
monitoring winds,
moving through a grassy savannah of misinformation,
certain of the entitlement of their sex, their race,
their overweening weaponry.
They singled Abeer out
as the neocons singled out Iraq,
for its vulnerability,
for the treasures hidden beneath the plain folds of its dress.
They raped her
as the Coalition Provisional Authority raped Iraq,
forcing its legs,
authorizing foreign capital to penetrate, to seed itself.
And after raping her,
after killing her parents and her younger sister,
they poured petrol
and set her on fire.
She burned just as Iraq burns,
blue and orange flames devouring its body,
thick, black smoke scorching the throat and eyes
of anyone who tries to watch,
who tries to scream for help.
David Smith-Ferri is the author of Battlefield Without
Borders: Iraq Poems, forthcoming this fall from Haley's Publishing.
He can be reached at: smithferri@pacific.net
Oh Say You Can See
By ADAM ENGEL
trundled blue:
hanging beam:
white face red, purple
tongue, like amber waves
her eyes, "let freedom ring,"
the note said: "pain,"
"liberty, god bless"
Furiously fast she rides
bareback
full of hate for the enemy
who did this thing
that she then did
scalp hanging on her belt.
She is encamped on a hill
as though on a small island
in a vast sea.
She is climbing a family tree
in the branches so high
she can see forward and backward
time happening.
She sees a lady in fox fur.
A man dressed formally
stands beneath trophies
brought back from the hunt.
She is the fox.
She sees a tree felled
and sawed for winter
a barometer on her house wall.
She sees a woman a butterfly
emerging:
her man wins to his cause
newly opened lands
an hysterical mob.
The people's lands
lying before them
like the sea.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
