Poems by Mike Ladd

Humanity survives
To what end? It Survives

Humanity has survived
The disappearance of tribes

Blood in the rivers and oceans of millions

Humanity survived the sinister sneeze
Have calculated disease

The Choke of Famine
Even the famine of common sense

So Why in the safety of my big picture
In my Bronx bunker
Of razor wire and rhetoric
Of well paved poverty

Where even here
A notion of survival over living resides

Why do my Hands shake when write this

When I can keep safe my spirit
From the terror of telecasters

When I can take stock of my distance
And soften screams of millions of civilians, humanity
No, children, the hope of more children
Gasping in the air that floods a cut womb.
The screams of soul and flesh
And the dreams of more soul

Why do my hands shake?

When last night I slept
And my body is strong

Well fed and strong

Strong enough to know
What my mind cannot fathom

Like a boy who is lucky enough
To hear the gun cock

My mind will catch up
Hurry, catch up

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Inanna After Baghdad

I saw her in the market
Her skin and dates in her wax palm
Matched in shaded sun

Uruk or Nippur, impossible to recall
They are sand and wind that mound to tells
Yet she was there

And here below the innards of a ghost
That was earth, the black clouds of oil
I see her walk in dust in the absence of dunes

In the deceiving Eden of these palms
She like I, has no tongue, no limbs
To gesture tired history

The horror is in brown pools of song
That wail where her eyes once were
A well of time over providence