By the dawn’s early light, we are counting syllables, and singing Anacretontic verse, odes to the battle of Baltimore. Bal-ti-mor my granny would say, parsing out the Irish word, the great house of Bel (not Bal), the god of fire. Bel, as in Belgrade, Beograd. No bears here, just the last fires of summer, approaching Lugnasadh and waiting for the fire hill signal on every hill, the signal to alight the Wicker Man’s annual burning—custom pre-dating the rocket’s red glare by several millennia. But everything follows what came before it. In this, nothing is original. They say the bombs bursting in air over the deserts of Baghdad were like an early Fourth of July. We celebrated the war on St. Patrick’s Day, and the Irish community was up in arms, the holiday having been usurped, and sullied —his birthday? Who knows. But it became that after the poet died. What so proudly we hail. Where do we all hail from? My brain is on fire at the twilight’s last gleaming beneath a full moon, a blue moon—to herald in the birth of a nation with all its bigotry and glory, Cassandra-faced and blind, smiling with false grace to the new dawn. Call it Fahrenheit, 911.
7/2/2004 Writers’ Group
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