Our Friends and Allies

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Our Friends and Allies

This news item is more than worrying.

Bigger US Military Role in the Philippines Sought

Sought by whom? For what? And to think the US is in huge economic trouble, yet they keep expanding their military reach. One wonders.

The article does not mention how, through many decades, there had been huge resistance to US the military presence in the country. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 forced the US to abandon its controversial military bases.

Here is a poem I wrote in 1991 and appears in Alien to Any Skin.

The Memory of Snow

When ash falls like snow

(though snow we've never had

and snow I've never seen)

why do we remember America?

Is it Sesame Street outside

where racism is non-existent

and the eagle is a big yellow bird

talking to a rag in a can?

I do not know what

they've taught us to forget.

Yet the memory of snow persists.

Walking on whitened streets

I thought of America moving out

of the volcano's danger zone

leaving my ancient sisters and brothers

curled up in their huts

like so much pubic hair.

I cannot read the earth,

but this much I know:

the world will not end.

There still is so much to unlearn

like fabricated memories

of America where it snows

and children make snowballs

and snowmen with carrot noses.

It is ash that falls, not snow.

I must learn to tell the difference.

June 1991

-o-

Collapsed hangars at Clark Air Base after Mount Pinatubo's eruption in 1991. Source: Wikipedia