Thats the end of the South Africa poems, for now.

Remember Prussian Blue? That little white supremacist singing duo. Like smoosh only creepy? Well guess where they've moved?
Kalispell!
Okay, so I know it doesn't have the same power for non MT folks as writing "missoula" but kalispell is pretty fricken close to where I grew up.
Which just proves that I need to write a movie about them! Like now! Its fate I tell you.
But on another note: would someone please tell me why there has been a growth in white supremacists in my dear state? Cause, thats, like, not cool.
For more go to http://missoulanews.com/News/News.asp?no=5967.

I know I'm pushing Plante's patience but here's poem #3

My mothers mother
Uses tea bags three times
Dipping
Einz, zwei, drei,
And then drying them
On polish crockery
To be used
Again
And again
When she gives me the cup
Brewed with burned tea leaves
And softened with old milk
Her hands shake.
She is not the kind of woman
Who normally has quaking hands.
“why do you want to hear these things?”
“Ich bin neugarig.”
My mothers mothers blood
Is stained with forced tattoo
Whose poisoned ink still runs through my veins
Her hands still scared
Where they gripped barbed wire
When I open my mouth
To speak the old language.
Her eyes water
“that language betrayed us.
I am American now. You are American.”
She pauses.
“Besides, you said that wrong.”

My fathers father
Sat me on his knee
Taught me to count
Eins, zwei, drei,
Taught me my letters
Ah, bee, Sey,
Taught me the language of my name

My fathers father
Is missing the pointer finger
On his right hand
When I was young he told me
That it was bitten off by a lion
In Egypt.
When I grew old enough
To learn the words
World
War
Two
I asked him if he was with rommel
In the desert

My fathers father wont tell me where he was
What he was
Who he was
But I know he was army at least.
So I know he probably was
That hated hated word.

Did my fathers father
Stare at my mothers mother
Through a chain link fence
In the old country
Hating her
Loathing him
Across a void so vast
No one thought it would ever be spanned.
Not knowing that 40 years later
Their blood would mix
Their languages would join
And connect
And bind
And form something
Strange
American
Me.
I speak with the tongue that tried to kill my grandmother
I pray with the religion he thought was taking over the world
Their battles are clawing apart my blood
Until I am not be anything anymore
Not Jew
Not German
They tried to erase the past by becoming America
And yet I am everything
All of it
Too.

Poem from South Africa #2

Hold, click, adjust, rewind
Hold, click, adjust, rewind
Hold, click, adjust, rewind
Hold, click, adjust, rewind
A girl stands
Ankle deep in water
Grinning at the camera
As the rain falls down
Hold, click, adjust, rewind
With a flip of the page
She is gone
Replaced by herself
Wrapped in a flag
Pouting
Pretending to be sultry
Flip the page
And again she is gone
And again she reappears
In the dark the shudder is open
“Hold still”
Arty night time shots
“Hold still” for 30 seconds
A dancing candle
Casts shadows into
Infinity
Hold, pause, pause, click, adjust, rewind.
The pictures slide through my fingers
Substantial memories
Shown onto paper
Soaked with chemicals
And given to me
As gifts
As mementos
As a solid reminder
Of our love
Trapped in two dimensions
Forever.
Hold, click, adjust, rewind
With a flip of the page
There I am again
Laughing into the lens
Laughing as you futz with
“aperture” and “shudder speed”
Big words I don’t understand
“hold still”
Click
The picture is blurred
But I can see in my eyes
How much I loved you
I imagine
Your face behind the lens
Ordering to move my arm
Or lift my chin
I imagine
Your hair
Curling out around the camera
As though that were your
Eyes and
Nose and
Mouth.
But in my book
There is not picture of a
Camera faced
Creature
Only me
And me
And me
And me.
Flip the page.
I am sick of seeing myself
Through your eyes
Why did I never take the camera
And try to capture you?
Flip the page.
Seven thousand
Nine hundred and
Thirty seven miles
Separates us
Three years
Separates us
I feel these photos
Light in my hands
And feel your fingers
In mine
But there is no click
No freeze
No image trapped
Inescapable on film
Only the vapor of memory.
Flip the page.
Flip the page.
And the book is done
But I start over
Flip the page
A girl stands
Ankle deep in water
Staring at you
Loving you
Forever
In a way
Not possible
For us humans
To manage.
Flip the page.
Flip the page.
And every whirr of the machine
Every click of the shudder
Was your way of saying
I love you too.
Flip the page.
And I want the
Hold
And I want the
Click
But all I have are
Paper and
Chemicals and
Memories
Rushing away
Like rain down the storm drain
Flip the page
The flag
Flip the page
The candle
Flip the page
Trying to see you
In me
Trying to put you
In those pictures
With me.
But you are a Point Of View
You are the lenses
And the shudder
Opening to record
The toss of my hair
The coyness of my grin
And leaving no print of your own
Except in my eyes
In my smile
And in my love
Stuck in this book
My love
Inescapable
My love
I love you.
Hold, click, adjust, rewind
Hold, click, adjust, rewind
Hold, click, adjust, rewind
Hold, click, adjust, rewind

The poem I performed in South Africa

In may
the lilacs bloom so sticky sweet
plucked for tea
served to small children falling in love
so sweet
June
graduation gowns
hats turn to helmets
tassels to tasers
books to bullets
university education promised
R
O
T
C
and before you know it you are so far away from me
were then too
when we watched those towers fall
hands clasped together
did not bind us
you wanted revenge
revenge for the
2945 killed
and as the numbers of solders dead clicks ever closer to that mark
you write me
dear
I love you
Dear
its hot
dear
I’ve never felt so alive
dear
in my life
not even in my arms
or between my thighs
or kissing me in the cool may rain
as lilac petals rained down
down to the depths of sandy hell
and
your blood is on your hands
and
my blood is on our sheets
and
did you know I saved them
those sheets
hold them close
a memory of our love
so alive
like I saved a tea pot full of lilac tea
that I made the day you went away
convinced that you’d be back in time to drink it
finally throwing it out when the stench was too much to bear
like I saved your laundry
letters
boots
like I would record your phone calls if I could
save your sex in a bottle if I could.

In July they fly the bodies to Rammstein air force base in western Germany
before bringing them back home
home to where you kissed me
told me you loved me
promised me
for ever and ever
home to the ground you will not be a part of
because you asked to be cremated

Mae

In May, the lilacs bloom so sticky sweet, plucked for tea, fed to small children falling in love, so sweet. The rivers run high, push their borders, make people worry or wonder but always always the flood banks hold, and houses, built too close to beautiful rivers, manage to continue toying with nature. Dams strain against the added pressure. Young trees are torn up from their roots and lodge themselves against the flood banks and the dams. Sometimes ice flows down, big chunks and it stirs up the sediment at the bottom of the milltown dam, filling the river with cyanide and mercury and a month or so later, as that sediment flows into the sea a little more of the Pacific Ocean will die. Later, they would try to remove the dam, take away the sediment and bury it in barrels, try to clean up the United States' largest superfund site, but in the May of 1995, there was barely even talk of such things.
Because it was May, and in May people are giddy. Parkas and fleece lined boots are stuffed with cedar and hidden for the next three to four months. In May people can be confident that the long winter was finally over. Sure winters were getting shorter but they still controlled life for 8 months out of the year. And global warming really only succeeded in making the weather more unpredictable, more manic depressive, more vindictive. There might be a 60 degree day in February and the people would thank the gods for a chance to wear tee-shirts but every one knew that mother nature would come around to bite you in the ass. And so while winter became less stable, with less snow, she lasted longer and became more vicious. Temperatures dropped to unheard of depths and snow and ice would creep later and later into spring. On June 9th of 2001 there was even a summer blizzard.
It wasn’t a particularly violent storm as these things go, but the trees were unprepared. Slowly growing leaves since April, they were in the full flower of summer. So when the snow came, it had something to rest on and it pulled down branch after branch, taking roofs and power lines with it. During the night people woke to the screaming of the trees. In the pitch blackness it sounded like murder or the end of the world. The power went out and those awake could not see into the dark. If they choose to go near their windows that is. Most didn’t though, frightened that the old cotton wood across the ditch that they had been meaning to cut down would take this opportunity to crash through the roof. So they stayed in bed, with the childlike belief that their blankets would protect them, that if they closed their eyes it would all go away. Some succeeded in going back to sleep but many stayed awake, listening for the end. And like much strange weather, it ended with the dawn. By nine am it was a balmy 50 degrees but the roads were nearly impassable due to the carnage. The hundred year old maples of the university area, the cotton woods, the aspens ached and bled in the morning light. The road shimmered, as though covered in ice but it was only water.
The ponderosa pines, those tall trees that smell like vanilla or caramel, that covered the mountains were fine, of course. They had been designed by nature or god to withstand worse. But city trees, even Montana city trees, were almost uniformly broken.
It was the second to last day of school when the blizzard hit and officials didn’t know what to do. Technically, there was just reason to cancel school. The Missoula school board states that school may only be canceled when it is dangerous for the buses to run. Since the school buses were so well winterized that happened maybe once every two years despite blizzards, and ice and slush and negative 30 degree weather. But it was June and the chains had been taken off. The logical thing was to cancel. But no one, not the superintendent, not the 3 high school principles not the 300 teachers, not the students wanted another day of school to push in to summer vacation, snow storm or no.
All told a majority of the students showed up. Those that couldn’t weren’t penalized but it meant that the poor teachers had to keep giving finals for a week or so after. The students had good reasons, usually farm kids with blocked roads, or ranch kids who spent the day repairing fences and tending to wounded cows.
Amy wasn't a farm kid, or a ranch kid. But a tree had landed on her truck and the long windy dirt road they called a driveway had been made impassable. She lived in the mountains, surrounded by Ponderosas, but also Larch and Tamarack, and they had come down. She spent the day she should have finished chemistry dragging branches off the road. The larger logs, her father chained to his truck and dragged to the house, where he chain sawed and stacked them and let them sit for a year to dry, before burning them in the winter to keep warm. "This is kind of a blessing in disguise," he told Amy and went on to ramble about how nice it would be to not have to go out hunting for fire wood or buy it, how they would sit together in front of the stove in a year, him reading, her doing homework. Amy nodded, she might have even agreed with him. But by the time those trees were actually burned, there was no way Amy and Noah Schwartz would be in the same room together. It always takes a tragically long time for trees to die.