Plagiarism - Poem

Progressive, The, June, 2003 by David Baker

Plagiarism

   Of particular note is the issue
   of originality. Each boy has
   etched and painted-over in purple his
   initials onto his bike's frame tubing.
   Presumably this will prevent someone
   from taking it, riding it, mistaking
   its true ownership, which is important
   if you are to keep your integrity.
   They have propped and parked their expensive rides
   along the dusty path by the chopped field--

   as their fathers before them, they sweep now
   like water, recurrent in waves, chasing

   a large, white ball across the big park.
   American art is bereft by war,
   yet American play is a battle
   gone wild. Consider the bone-cracked games
   at the mall, the light spray of spit issued
   from spectators' lips on TV wrestling.
   But who would wish a real life of trauma,
   hunger, tyranny, grief, or the blood-bruised
   gums of poverty, even if that would
   provide our art authenticating pain?

   Goran Simic survived Sarajevo--
   a Serb married to a Muslim, with two

   small children--through three brute years of terror,
   hiding in a small apartment, writing
   poems: There's a photograph of my father
   carrying a sub-machine gun, a
   Russian gun (only the best for the best),
   and walking into our town from the hills.
   He's yelling "Victory! Victory"--thin
   as death and wearing a garland of flowers.
   Is he grateful for his daily witness?
   Someone has strung a clothes-line in the grave

   yard, he writes in "Sarajevo Spring," and
   a hundred diapers semaphore the wind.

   Or would a poet, in such circumstance,
   rather dream of seagulls and the sea and
   play a child's fast game? Our local hero,
   four-hundred-metre man ... sits all day by
   the running track in his wheelchair as if
   it might suddenly come back to him: what next.
   Is borrowed agony more or less true?
   Life goes on en masse, just as the boys seem
   a little battalion of strategy,
   a few flanked out by weeping willows,

   one or two speeding counter with the ball,
   flailing, falling. Their voices swell like wind.

   Courage takes on a more pointed meaning
   in more oppressive societies, writes
   Louise Gluck. Free society, the society
   that neither restricts speech nor values it,
   enervates by presenting too few
   obstacles. Gluck's not advocating war,
   but she's sick of American poets
   envying the prestige of bravery,
   when the horror in American hearts
   is more like pale irony than peril.

   How can we make art from that? Or let's be
   blunt: how can we not? The poet's work is

   the hard effort of the passions gathered
   from everyone around us. We speak what
   we're given. We must be grateful for it.
   Otherwise the boys below in the field
   blown beautiful with sun and clover might be
   dead in an instant. It's what Milosz saw
   in Warsaw, fifty years ago, haunting
   his work ever since--in his head the image
   of a white skull kicked by feet in passing.
   In his head, the image of a white skull

   kicked by feet in passing. What else to say?
   Thus blood, as the cheer goes, makes the grass grow.

David Baker's most recent book of poems, "Changeable Thunder," was published in the fall of 2001 by University of Arkansas Press. He is poetry editor of The Kenyon Review.