In the parking lot of Mercy Hospital, and inside of the building four people were killed yesterday.  Yesterday twelve people were killed in a California country music bar.  The slaughter continues in our armed-up society.  Wouldn’t think of giving up our guns. In fact we have the right to carry them around with us on our person to most places.  You can’t walk into a school or into the courthouse with your semi-auto holstered under your arm.  Just about everywhere else is Ok.

I was particularly disturbed at the news report with images of regular army soldiers laying concertina “razor wire” to reinforce the barriers, and choke down the points of entry at our border with Mexico.  I can envision desperate women, children, and young men, asylum seekers,  caught in the wire, badly cut up.

To read accounts, or to sit through a cinema story of WWI soldiers caught in the wire in no-man’s land between the trenches is one thing……  To understand that fate awaits the dispossessed who seek refuge here, is another.

I found this poem in a “poetry save” folder.

National Insecurity

by Thomas Tranströmer

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X
and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.
As a mottled butterfly is visible against the ground
so the demon merges with the opened newspaper.
A helmet worn by no one has taken power.
The mother turtle flees flying under water.

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Who is Thomas Tranströmer?

1931–2015

Tomas Tranströmer, who was one of Sweden’s leading poets of his generation, studied poetry and psychology at the University of Stockholm

Tranströmer’s poetry, building on Modernism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, contains powerful imagery concerned with issues of fragmentation and isolation. “He has perfected a particular kind of epiphanic lyric, often in quatrains, in which nature is the active, energizing subject, and the self (if the self is present at all) is the object,” notes poet-critic Katie Peterson in the Boston Review.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, his honors include the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, the Aftonbladets Literary Prize, the Bonnier Award for Poetry, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Oevralids Prize, the Petrarch Prize in Germany, the Swedish Award from International Poetry Forum, and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize. His work has been translated into more than 50 languages.

Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990, and after a six-year silence published his collection Sorgegondolen (Grief Gondola) (1996); this collection was translated into English by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl as The Sorrow Gondola (2010). Prior to his stroke, he worked as a psychologist, focusing on the juvenile prison population as well as the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He died in 2015.

–excerpt Poetry Foundation