As an introduction to the poems, here is Mike Yarrow:

I have worked as Kosovo Peace Education Coordinator with the American Friends Service Committee for three months reading scores of articles about the tragic events there, organizing efforts to stop the bombing and negotiate a just peace and instigating efforts to put pressure on the US government to help clean up, rebuild and heal. These short poems moved me powerfully and in ways that the official statements I drafted could not do. I have concluded from all that I have read and heard that the international community desperately needs a constructive alternative to “cruise missile humanitarianism.”

Mike Yarrow,
Kosovo Peace Education Coordinator
American Friends Service Committee

Lest we forget...

HAIKU FROM THE RECENT WAR

surgical strike --
a nurse in her own
          blood

Belgrade zoo
long before the bomber
the animals’ crescendo


after the rape
her husband’s eyes
     a void


storks cruise
across the spring moon
          missile


I send a fax
protesting the bombing
pages come out hot

Ruth Yarrow

And three poems from June Jordan...

APRIL 7, 1999

Nothing is more cruel
than the soldiers who command
the widow
to be grateful
that she’s still alive



April 9, 1999
      (for Ethelbert)

In Brooklyn when the flowering
forsythia escaped the concrete patterns
of tight winter days
I didn’t think about long
distances
or F-117s in contrast
to a lover or an army
on the ground
up close
and personal as washing out a shirt
by hand
the soapsuds and the fingers and the cloth
an ordinary ritual
to interdict the devils of 2,000 lb. bombs
dropped from more than 25,000 feet above
the children
scrambling from the schoolyard
suddenly aflame

until you called from Washington
D.C.
to say
"Oh, let me be
that shirt!"



APRIL 10, 1999

The enemies proliferate
by air
by land
they bomb the cities
they burn the earth
they force the families into miles and miles of violent exile

30 or 40 or 80,000 refugees
just before this
check-point
or who knows where
they disappear

the woman cannot find her brother
the man cannot recall the point of all
     the papers somebody took
     away from him
the rains fall to purify the river
the darkness does not slow the trembling
     message of the tanks

Hundreds of houses on fire and still
  the enemies do not seek and find
     the enemies

only the ones without water
only the ones without bread
only the ones without guns

There is international TV
There is no news

The enemies proliferate
The homeless multiply
And I
I watch I wait

I am already far
and away
too late

too late

Copyright © 1999, June Jordan
Posted by permission of the poet
All rights reserved
(from The Progressive, June 1999)

It is never too late to rebuild. For further information on the effort to clean up, rebuild and heal Kosovo and Serbia contact Diana Roose,* Director, Peace Education Division, American Friends Service Committee, 1501 Cherry Street, Philadelphia, PA 91902.

*This feature is sporting a hidden bonus track!

For more poetry prompted by the war in Kosovo, read Janan Platt Saylor on this very site, & visit Aikya Param’s Poets for Balkan Peace collection.

More on Ruth Yarrow:

• There’s a fine series of Ruth Yarrow’s haiku in the Modern American Haiku Poets collection at Terebess Asia Online (TAO).
• Betsy Quigg has written an essay on Ruth Yarrow’s haiku which is posted at the Millikin University haiku site.

• Compare prices  to buy her book • No One Sees the Stems

  Her chapbook is No One Sees the Stems (High/Coo Press, 1995, out of print).

• There’s a brief bio & a RealAudio recording of “Poem # one” from The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones at the Academy of American Poets site.
• Voices from the Gaps, an expansive compendium of information about the lives & works of women of color, has a page on her.
• “Poem About Progress and Process” is at the DIA Center for the Arts’ page for her 1996 reading there with Cornelius Eady.
• “Jim Crow: The Sequel” is posted in bonVìbré Prosim’s Phat African American Poetry Book.
• “What Great Grief Has Made the Empress Mute” is posted in the June Jordan segment of the KQED television show “Speaking Freely: An Evening with Remarkable Women.”
• Her readings & conversations as a Kelly Writer’s House Fellow at Penn in 2001 were Webcast & are archived online at Professor Al Filreis’ contemporary poetry site.
• The Poetry 4 the People Web program lives on at UC Berkeley.