works by william pham, 2005-present

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Here is a Mighty Accounting

Here is a mighty thing.

Americans who marched through jungles
  with guns on their backs
  and the lack of know
      in their eyes
transnationalized by reporters,
transposed to television sets and
multiplied in factors of ten,
ten thousand, ten million,
tens of hundreds of thousands of
millions of men of women of children;

Here is a mighty war.

  And if you look with a magnifying glass
  at the dust kicked up by the Cobra snakes
             (oh, those snakes, what beauty,
              what glittering scales
              and coruscating fangs,
              Folding-Fin Aerial Fangs,
              Tube-launched Optically-tracked
              Wire-guided fangs)
      you will not see the dust of life.

Here is a mighty accounting:

A million and a half of a million
now dust.
Ten and ten and ten times again
the fifty thousand on television.

Fifty thousand strangers do not have
the weight of a million
and a half of a million,
measured not in lbs.
             or kg
             or metric tonnes
but in the faces traced by numbers,
the ghosts of a millstone arithmetic.

The weight of one point five million ghosts.

It is as immeasurable as all the dust of decades,
  ten years
  and ten
  and ten again.
And there may be another ten years
before we shed the dust from our backs.

    And yet

This dust is in my bones and in my breath--
in every word I exhale there is dust;
it fills my lungs it fills my ears
and gathers in the crook of my neck,
               the gaps above my collarbone,
               the grooves along my biceps.

    And yet

The dust does not become me.
The dust does not become us.

We stand on top of dust like kings;
our parents raised us to be kings and queens,
and we build our homes and fortunes
upon the piles of dust and ghosts.

We who are neither dust nor ghosts,
we were raised to be kings and queens.
Our parents carried such heavy costs.
The immeasurable dust of decades
followed our parents a very long way.

    And yet

Here is a mighty accounting:

A million and half of a million more,
We lift our heads above the fog of war.

copyright (c) 2007 by william pham