On My Desk

Michael Lally's *March 18, 2003*
(a couple of brief quotes}

"...Is that why now it's life I'm obsessed with?
Or is that because when I watched
the second plane crash into the second tower on TV
a thin blue tube hung from my urethra,
attached to a clear plastic bag, the remnant of a
cancer operation the week before,
unaware an old friend was on that flight,
at that moment incinerated,
a woman who was kind to me when
she didn't need to be?
How many people have died
before you got a chance to tell them what you meant to?
Does it seem there's
not enough
sometimes because it is
too much?
Haven't I said and written more than once
that poetry saved my life?
Did it for you?
Wasn't it the only thing that could stop the war
in my heart and head
over where I thought I was being led
by the clan and neighborhood
and extended family of cops
I was born into a the beginning of another war
when the prognosis was bleak for *our* side?....
Did anyone ever discuss how we obliterated
Dresden,for no strategic reason, or caused
more civilian death and devastation there and
in the fire bombing of Tokyo than with
the atom bombs we dropped?
Why didn't I know that General Electric
got off with a fine and hand slaps
for colluding with the Nazis or that IBM set up
the Nazi record keeping or that we refused
to bomb the railroad tracks that carried the
freight cars full of Jews to their destruction?"

from *March 18, 2003*
a poem for peace
Drawings by Alex Katz
59 pages
Edizione Charta, Milano, 2006
first published by Libellum Books

Michael Lally had some kind words to say recently about the book version of *fait accompli* on his blog
Lally's Alley.
It was also an occasion for a, classic Lally riff- well worth reading- on his ideas and personal experiences concerning poetry, poetics and poetry communities.