Collected Poems 1947-1997

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Collected Poems 1947-1997 Page 46

by Allen Ginsberg

birds flocking

  rocks foamed

  floating above

  the

  horizon’s

  watery

  wrinkled

  skin

  grandmother

  oceanskirt

  rumbling

  pebbles

  silver hair ear to ear

  May 28, 1971

  Hum Bom!

  I

  Whom bomb?

  We bomb them!

  Whom bomb?

  We bomb them!

  Whom bomb?

  We bomb them!

  Whom bomb?

  We bomb them!

  Whom bomb?

  You bomb you!

  Whom bomb?

  You bomb you!

  Whom bomb?

  You bomb you!

  Whom Bomb?

  You bomb you!

  What do we do?

  Who do we bomb?

  What do we do?

  Who do we bomb?

  What do we do?

  Who do we bomb?

  What do we do!

  Who do we bomb?

  What do we do?

  You bomb! You bomb them!

  What do we do?

  You bomb! You bomb them!

  What do we do?

  We bomb! We bomb them!

  What do we do?

  We bomb! We bomb them!

  Whom bomb?

  We bomb you!

  Whom bomb?

  We bomb you!

  Whom bomb?

  You bomb you!

  Whom bomb?

  You bomb you!

  May 1971

  II

  Why bomb?

  We don’t want to bomb!

  Why bomb?

  We don’t want to bomb!

  Why bomb?

  You don’t want to bomb!

  Why bomb?

  You don’t want to bomb!

  Who said bomb?

  Who said we had to bomb?

  Who said bomb?

  Who said we had to bomb?

  Who said bomb?

  Who said you had to bomb?

  Who said bomb?

  Who said you had to bomb?

  We don’t bomb!

  We don’t bomb!

  We don’t bomb!

  We don’t bomb!

  We don’t bomb!

  We don’t bomb!

  We don’t bomb!

  We don’t bomb!

  for Don Cherry and Elvin Jones

  New York, June 16, 1984

  September on Jessore Road

  Copyright © 1972 by May King Poetry Music Inc., Allen Ginsberg

  September on Jessore Road

  Millions of babies watching the skies

  Bellies swollen, with big round eyes

  On Jessore Road—long bamboo huts

  Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts

  Millions of fathers in rain

  Millions of mothers in pain

  Millions of brothers in woe

  Millions of sisters nowhere to go

  One Million aunts are dying for bread

  One Million uncles lamenting the dead

  Grandfather millions homeless and sad

  Grandmother millions silently mad

  Millions of daughters walk in the mud

  Millions of children wash in the flood

  A Million girls vomit & groan

  Millions of families hopeless alone

  Millions of souls Nineteenseventyone

  homeless on Jessore road under gray sun

  A million are dead, the millions who can

  Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan

  Taxi September along Jessore Road

  Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load

  past watery fields thru rain flood ruts

  Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts

  Wet processions Families walk

  Stunted boys big heads dont talk

  Look bony skulls & silent round eyes

  Starving black angels in human disguise

  Mother squats weeping & points to her sons

  Standing thin legged like elderly nuns

  small bodied hands to their mouths in prayer

  Five months small food since they settled there

  on one floor mat with a small empty pot

  Father lifts up his hands at their lot

  Tears come to their mother’s eye

  Pain makes mother Maya cry

  Two children together in palmroof shade

  Stare at me no word is said

  Rice ration, lentils one time a week

  Milk powder for warweary infants meek

  No vegetable money or work for the man

  Rice lasts four days eat while they can

  Then children starve three days in a row

  and vomit their next food unless they eat slow.

  On Jessore road Mother wept at my knees

  Bengali tongue cried mister Please

  Identity card torn up on the floor

  Husband still waits at the camp office door

  Baby at play I was washing the flood

  Now they won’t give us any more food

  The pieces are here in my celluloid purse

  Innocent baby play our death curse

  Two policemen surrounded by thousands of boys

  Crowded waiting their daily bread joys

  Carry big whistles & long bamboo sticks

  to whack them in line They play hungry tricks

  Breaking the line and jumping in front

  Into the circle sneaks one skinny runt

  Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage

  The guards blow their whistles & chase them in rage

  Why are these infants massed in this place

  Laughing in play & pushing for space

  Why do they wait here so cheerful & dread

  Why this is the House where they give children bread

  The man in the bread door Cries & comes out

  Thousands of boys & girls Take up his shout

  Is it joy? is it prayer? “No more bread today”

  Thousands of Children at once scream “Hooray!”

  Run home to tents where elders await

  Messenger children with bread from the state

  No bread more today! & no place to squat

  Painful baby, sick shit he has got.

  Malnutrition skulls thousands for months

  Dysentery drains bowels all at once

  Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep

  Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep

  Refugee camps in hospital shacks

  Newborn lay naked on mothers’ thin laps

  Monkeysized week-old Rheumatic babe eye

  Gastroenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die

  September Jessore Road rickshaw

  50,000 souls in one camp I saw

  Rows of bamboo huts in the flood

  Open drains, & wet families waiting for food

  Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,

  American Angel machine please come fast!

  Where is Ambassador Bunker today?

  Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?

  Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?

  Smuggling dope in Bangkok’s green shade.

  Where is America’s Air Force of Light?

  Bombing North Laos all day and all night?

  Where are the President’s Armies of Gold?

  Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?

  Bringing us medicine food and relief?

  Napalming North Vietnam and causing more grief?

  Where are our tears? Who weeps for this pain?

  Where can these families go in the rain?

  Jessore Road’s children close their big eyes

  Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?

  Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?

  Who can bring bread to this shit flood foul’d lair?

 
Millions of children alone in the rain!

  Millions of children weeping in pain!

  Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe

  Ring out ye voices for Love we dont know

  Ring out ye bells of electrical pain

  Ring in the conscious American brain

  How many children are we who are lost

  Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?

  What are our souls that we have lost care?

  Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare—

  Cries in the mud by the thatch’d house sand drain

  Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet shit-field rain

  waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!

  whose children still starve in their mothers’ arms curled.

  Is this what I did to myself in the past?

  What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?

  Move on and leave them without any coins?

  What should I care for the love of my loins?

  What should we care for our cities and cars?

  What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?

  How many millions sit down in New York

  & sup this night’s table on bone & roast pork?

  How many million beer cans are tossed

  in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?

  Cigar gasolines and asphalt car dreams

  Stinking the world and dimming star beams—

  Finish the war in your breast with a sigh

  Come taste the tears in your own Human eye

  Pity us millions of phantoms you see

  Starved in Samsara on planet TV

  How many millions of children die more

  before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?

  How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild

  Armed forces that boast the children they’ve killed?

  How many souls walk through Maya in pain

  How many babes in illusory rain?

  How many families hollow eyed lost?

  How many grandmothers turning to ghost?

  How many loves who never get bread?

  How many Aunts with holes in their head?

  How many sisters skulls on the ground?

  How many grandfathers make no more sound?

  How many fathers in woe

  How many sons nowhere to go?

  How many daughters nothing to eat?

  How many uncles with swollen sick feet?

  Millions of babies in pain

  Millions of mothers in rain

  Millions of brothers in woe

  Millions of children nowhere to go

  New York, November 14–16, 1971

  IX

  MIND BREATHS ALL OVER THE PLACE

  (1972–1977)

  Sad Dust Glories (1972–1974)

  Ego Confessions (1974–1977)

  Sad Dust Glories

  (1972–1974)

  Ayers Rock / Uluru Song

  When the red pond fills fish appear

  When the red pond dries fish disappear.

  Everything built on the desert crumbles to dust.

  Electric cable transmission wires swept down.

  The lizard people came out of the rock.

  The red Kangaroo people forgot their own song.

  Only a man with four sticks can cross the Simpson Desert.

  One rain turns red dust green with leaves.

  One raindrop begins the universe.

  When the raindrop dries, worlds come to their end.

  Central Australia, March 23, 1972

  Voznesensky’s “Silent Tingling”

  Must be thousands of sweet gourmets rustling through

  leaf crowded branches, thrushes cracking seedling shells

  all over America like crystalline carillon bells,

  a really strange silent tingling.

  Silent carillons, not to celebrate Main Street

  but rustling up some food their only scene—

  No miracle but millions of hungry souls

  silently tingling.

  This tingling silence heralds

  an orgy of hermit thrushes eating

  like thousands of song-men’s clapsticks clacking

  or faraway Moscow’s million bells

  —some dream collective—generational vogue.

  Thrush communes don’t be afraid of the big Broom,

  your flock continues an ancient tradition,

  now all over America—collective marriage;

  though some detractors put down your in-group, not big enough!

  A silent Individualist in top hat & tails drest

  coffinlike denounces your collective struggles in bed—

  but his own wife wears rings on every finger,

  as if she wound up in a group marriage.

  This gentle gang’s only enemy’s insects,

  Cleaning up bark parasites—silently, silently—

  Anybody can crush bones and oink louder

  but cant beat this silent tingling.

  Fast New York Sydney chicks—

  thanks Brisbane birds & Chicago thrushes

  for your own silent tingling—your cities’ trees’

  leaves tremble like golden curlicues on Byzantine crosses.

  Maybe someday our descendants

  ’ll ask about this poet—What’d he sing about?

  I didn’t ring Halleluiah bells, I didn’t clank leg-irons,

  I was silently tingling.

  Translated with Andrei Voznesensky

  Darwin Land—Cairns, Australia, March 26–29, 1972

  These States: to Miami Presidential Convention

  I

  Philadelphia city lights boiling under the clouds

  green Babylon’s heat attracting rain,

  lightning, smoke gathered

  about the excited city—shouts, vibration

  of trucks, radio antennae, streets’

  solid electric glitter under sulphur waterfumes—

  the plane glides to Miami Beach over Atlantic’s

  Coast metropolis

  red downtown sores of theater money,

  bar sign pinprick bulbs under

  Cloud curtain’d sunlit velvet horizon

  To the political drama, march to

  Auditorium thru tacky downtown

  Cuban neons blinking angry language,

  Yippies survived unto this Presidentiad!

  Woe to the States, whoever’s the empty President

  Nixon McGovern X or Caesar

  Must decree end to matter habit,

  America swallowing aluminum sleep pills

  Cries of millions of trees travel thru TV

  loudspeakers to the Athletic Club’s basement steamroom—

  Millions of yellow faces call thru radio

  Cries of the longhairs in the Rockies,

  Choruses of American prophets in their graves

  echo thru newspaper horns to the

  Ear Consciousness Mind

  Matter Consumption must end,

  Dirty alchemy destroys the House—

  Billion year old leaf plates become inert matter

  Plastic particles mixed

  with living cells in the Walleyed

  pike’s retina—

  Soaring over Atlantic’s lit-up electric

  houses to the politics Warre

  Ah! Shall be my mantra—America’s gasp of Awe—

  Ah as Fireworks ascend & light glitters

  faery shimmering in treetop darkness

  sky over Eastside Park July 4th—Ah

  As the enlightened Aborigine sighs his

  soul-journey with birds to New Guinea

  Ah! the madman screamed

  to himself in the silence of the Ward

  Ah as car owner collapsed into

  his ruined heap of metal on his own

  Front Yard

  Ah! the divorcee steps off her plane onto Mexico City Airport—

  Ah! as I ride spitting petrol i
nto the exquisite

  Midnight Atmosphere

  above cloud cities

  toward another gateway of Police Boys

  & State Powers convened

  Clocks Ticking two centuries

  now America

  approaching the great Ah of all cities

  burning under Clouds, Conscious

  of Death Machines Downtown.

  Ah, for the garden—

  After conversation with Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, Boulder, Spring 1972

  II

  O Peaceful & Wrathful Dieties & Politicians Rejoice, Rejoice

  left and right!

  Ah! liberty—we here together conscious of

  heart’s feeling ah!

  Massacre ah! selling images in America

  bellied meadow bombcrater photo mind

  scream face skin afire

  eyes penetrated by war needles

  Ah! to the Heart from Heart ever Grateful

  for mercy human understanding sigh—

  Ah! for our loves dead & gone

  Ah! for miseries we caused, youthful screaming

  Pig Cop selves

  Violence in other streets and nations

  Heads of State

  eyes flashing angry—

  Ah! that we know ourselves better,

  Ah! that America rise from

  the dead matter

  & transcend this body heavy asphalt usury

  being with each other

  Trembling with city hatred

  dropping acid Death Fear

  lovelessness alone on metal

  planet floor—or

  grass green meadow

  among Equal Creatures, trees flourishing their Barken Kind leaf flared—

  ah What Seek we in Miami Heaven Earth

  But End to Fear

  Ah! to rejoice in World Illusion

  airplane sound street body under sky—

  Apocatastasis Ah!

  Release of our knowledge

  our suffering in kind—

  Ah! together, ah! make peace!

  Ah What is this lightness that we know

  body empty & the mind

  Myriad Ah’d in Mid Metropolis zonked

  & baffled by its own Being,

  Angers, Loves & Wars—Great Politics shakes

  planet tremors through our souls—

  Ah! Great Consciousness Here

  Salutations to the Great Self we come to know

  Ah to All souls, Republican empty as

 

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