Read a poem by another poet written
on the same day:

August 6
(Dream Images)

1)

My hand gripped tight to my little girl's, our
essence coulda been splattered to bits against department store walls I
was fearing for our lives
in
that port town where Serbs were to commence shelling. A bomb explodes. A
piece of shrapnel, a sniper's bullet, a fear
of foreigners or something that
flimsy coulda been the cause of our demise & sacrifice our life forces for a
metallic sacrament, the warrior mentality gone mad, nobility twisted into
glitter and her stopping to grab cheap trinkets or formula.

2)

About war & its ability to reduce you to survival
an urge for peanut butter, a panic every
hour.
Later you realize the danger may not have been as intense,
the real action may have been elsewhere in the country, the
world keeps spinning. The sunrise. The robin
began to pry the worm from mini garden ecosystem. Switch
to the home of the brave where war never quite stops, but makes a
shift to a dominator culture of another kind. Poison, machines
& other
indescribable permutations of the need to control make
changes in the landscape which Europe understands,
came hard to them but quick in the
swirling bombs which rained
over the landscape & never directly affected
me.

3)

Music then was medicine poured in ears, it
became the banister on the stairway to hell
indistinguishable from air, water, lasagne.   We were
from the 60's only less than someone say 10 yrs older &
color was a tone or factor in our hallucinations.

4)

First, I return to the dream of baseball in wartime.
There's my daughter wanting to wander while
a bomb drops in the distance making an horrific &
loud vexation, psychic torture — I grind my teeth in memory of
explosive terror, carriers soon, now gunboats hurl bombs, building parts
splash back into the harbor
then we flee w/ all the Bosnians (I think)
ever fearful for our lives our terror
widening as splashdowns of department store rubble create
ripples in the bay under the gray Bosnian sky.

8.6.01 Starting w/ lines from
Tripping complied by Charles Hayes, pg 121, 363 & 364.