More Suns and a Letter to W

Lamp, All Saint’s Eve

Spider webs glisten
in the candle’s glow,
piercing the orange dusk
through carved pumpkin shells.

Jack-o-lanterns line
the leaf-blown sidewalk,
beacons for witches, ghosts –
children in search of treats.


Orient, Poet

The eastern sun warms his morning coffee;
afternoons, an eastern view shades his nap
interrupted when she walks up his steps,
new jueju lost when he hears her voice smile.



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Provided by my friend, Silvia Antonia

A letter to President George Bush

The Olympian's Editorial Board, September 11

Mr. President, aren't you tired yet?

How often can you mouth the same meaningless platitudes, the half-truths, the thinly veiled linkage between Iraq and 9/11, the ever-shifting excuses for failure?

You and your administrations' bully boys are on the third national tour to drum up support for your war of choice in Iraq and nothing has changed.

You and your administration say: stay the course; fight them there so we don't have to fight them here; don't cut and run; critics are unpatriotic or worse, appeasers to Islamic fascism; we'll stand down when they stand up; Iraq is the central front on the war on terrorism.

We're tired, Mr. President. We're tired of the rhetoric.

Remember: Iraq is a growing and immediate threat; Mission Accomplished; we'll be greeted as liberators; I can't imaging the war taking more than six months (Donald Rumsfeld); it's pretty well confirmed that the head of the 9/11 attack met with Iraqi secret service in Prague (Dick Cheney); it won't take hundreds of thousands of soldiers to subdue Iraq; Iraqi oil will pay for the war; we've found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (Bush); a democratically elected government will spread democracy around the Middle East; the insurgency is in its last throes . . .?

Mr. President, aren't you tired of your administration calling the more than 2,600 dead soldiers, the 19,000 wounded in combat and the more than 40,000 dead Iraqis "just a number?"

We're tired, Mr. President. We're tired of the incompetence, the death, the destruction.

Soldiers are doing a spectacular job on the ground, but even the best general has no hope when operating under a flawed strategy.

Mr. President, it's time to hold people accountable and regain the sense of unity that enveloped this nation in the wake of the 9/11 attack.

With all due respect, Mr. President, it's time to develop a bipartisan strategy for extricating this country from the misguided war in Iraq and focus on real solutions to the war on terror.

You may not be tired, Mr. President, but we are tired. We are sick and tired of the rhetoric, the incompetence and your politicization of this sacred day.

(The Olympian is from Olympia, WA.)