Here are the first two poems in a poem cycle of seven, “Letters to Edward Snowden”.
I began this poem cycle during the summer of 2013 when Edward Snowden was stranded in the Moscow Airport following his release of secret information about the extent of domestic surveillance in the USA.
If you’ll recall, Snowden had released a trove of information related to the alarming and patently illegal extent of CIA domestic civilian surveillance, as well as other disturbing information. Snowden worked directly and indirectly for the CIA and, at the time of his release of the secret files, before his escape from Hong Kong to Moscow, for NSA contractor Boos Allen Hamilton.
It is hard to think that this historic episode and Snowden’s actions might be something that anyone needs to be reminded of, but with the collective memory of the American culture being what it is... short and easily manipulated... it is perhaps essential to keep this story front and center as much as that is possible. Poetry may be a rather clumsy way to attempt this (poetry in the culture being what IT is), but it is what I do... for better or worse. And I felt, at the time, as many may have, some connection to Mr. Snowden and his situation... and wished I could have conversations with him while he was ensconced in an airport... a surreal and other-worldly place no matter where in the world one is. So, I decided to do that. In verse.
It also seems worth noting, especially in relation to the current and ongoing dystopian circumstances of Assange’s predicament, that Julian Assange and Wikileaks were directly and indirectly involved in Snowden’s ability to safely escape from the clutches of the American global security apparatus and to deliver him to relatively safe harbor.
As it happened, that safe harbor became Moscow, only because Snowden was unable to fly to any other country that offered asylum (and most only offered it if he was within their territorial jurisdiction when he applied for asylum) because the global security apparatus directed by President Obama had maneuvered allies into agreeing to take him into custody if he landed in or crossed through their airspace. This was done, in many cases, by the US threatening to take any country that allowed him to cross through their territorial boundaries or airspace off the list of global classmates they would share secret code ring messages or secret handshakes with.
Edward Snowden was stranded in the Moscow airport for about seven weeks. I composed one letter for each of those weeks. I’ve been tinkering with these poems since then.
I originally thought I would post one of the poems at a time... and perhaps one per week (while they lasted... get ‘em while their hot, don’tcha know), but then I felt that the initial posting might benefit the reader by getting a little deeper into the work prior to taking a break from it, let it brew a bit before going into the next “chapter”.
Long narrative poems seem to have become a tough sell, tougher than most poetry, and even tougher than most topical poetry that concerns controversial historical events and people. But then, I guess I don’t care about what is in or out of style.
Among poetry’s purposes there has always been a wide space allotted for poetic accounting of historical events, and from any and many perspectives. Just because we have somehow agreed to limit our enjoyment of poetry to blurts of clever and/or inspirational homilies, what amount to poetry-wizened “Dear Abby” columns, and incoherent blather that insists it’s surrealism, only reflects the shallowness of our evolving interactional brevity and cultural ADD... it says more about our shortcomings as a society of shrinking literacy than the nature of what poems have always been and what they might mean. —Bob Vance
*
*
LETTER TO EDWARD SNOWDEN (1)
Nights in the terminal flood
with the negative space of absence,
the last goodbyes said, those terrific blasts
of silence when the angle of all flights cease
and only the enclosed and perfect air roars
with white noise and snores
from sparsely occupied uncomfortable chairs
and the movements of the police.
In prisons designed to extract the truth
or beat men back into their most frightened child
the buzzing of light fixtures
is a primary torture, aside from bad music
and an incessant, repeated, swell of white noise
in languages
you cannot understand.
*
In some absurdist film plot
where being lost takes us
through the dark terrors
of living under the constant gaze
of the un-named, the faceless,
the bug's eye, we have grown accustomed to
that brush of terror
that awakens in us the subtle hegemony
of pretend secrets
from the habits of surveillance. Edward.
How can we rescue you?
*
As the poets say, even angels
wake us with a start, sweating against their swords
out of the tumultuous rivers of some text of freedom
that has melted stones, roads, homes,
the places we used to find water
when we could drink,
we are delivered with a jolt
back into the hum
of the constants of manufactured light,
and the slow emergence of mornings
where there can be none of the varied hues of dawn
and some sounds, a mechanical sweeper
perhaps, a conveyer belt, a worker
opening a cooler or a cash register,
become the terrible birds of the beginning
of another limbo of day.
You rub your face in that artificial shine, Edward, and then
you remember your name.
*
And perhaps that is not the most frightening dream.
Angels have no gift for spanning the bridge
between our sleep and any mouth to freedom
our most secret subterranean rivers promise.
We might rest in the gods’ hammocks of sunshine
and breezes like Icarus and his father
looking out over the shining Aegean
before their infamous flight
but must we always be dropped back
out of our dreams of deliverance
into the terminal of another harshly lit day?
*
What choices do we have?
What choices does dreaming give us?
Lost to a world we once remembered
where truth was a constant
and we knew what we had to do,
how can such truths continue to deliver us
to this tangle of mechanical halls,
never dark, always seething with secrets
crawling, pushing against the glass
always waiting to go home or fly away?
*
Edward, these letters, like any, solve nothing
other than to say that what you have done
can save none of us and still
might save us all.
If we could we would be your angels of deliverance.
The suns that spin the molten slurry
of the sky would provide you an exit
in whatever language necessary
and they would get you a home.
*
Home. Hardly has the word arrived
and my own guarantees of a familiar place
to sleep, to dream, is invaded
by the insolent watchers
inside and outside my dreams.
*
We are all sequestered
in the airports of our
islands of exile,
that prison of nightless sleep and you
are our metaphor:
Able to choose countries we can live in
but not allowed to fly to
for reasons lost in these terminal hallways
of power and evil,
and too secret to say.
*
*
LETTER TO EDWARD SNOWDEN (2)
In my country, the country
of my sight, the place I wish for, not
the one that has risen around me,
I wonder less about how
the world does what it does
than why.
*
There are those who marvel at the great wonders
built by our kin, the towers and the domes,
the marbled prophets, the queens and kings
the mysterious smiles and stories
of the layers of a muttering cosmos.
The obsession for them is all in engineering;
stories of girders or quotients
and formulas, the math of great spans over a greater river,
a way of molding muscle out of clay,
love out of marble.
But my own sub-species has an alternate eye,
Edward, the questions of how
have caved to the insistence of why.
We cobble together our possibilities
from a cavern of unknowns and denial,
the sickening smiles
and completely constructed warmth
of the lies of candidates and beauty queens.
I am curious less about the nature of invention
than the reasons it is pursued.
*
So tell me, from there in your cell surrounded
by sonic booms and Russians, why
are these things called secrets?
Didn't we know them already? Truly.
Is it proof we are after?
And is that why you may win the prize?
Why is it we now pretend
we were left in the dark?
And what can you know
about such a darkness, from there
your exile island
a station of eternal, but false,
light?
*
Knowing. This is the structure
of our greatest invention, the tower
of our lasting hope
and our imagination. That we can
know, even that we must,
like the kingfisher over the little gold river
weaving from bluff to bluff
with its little rasping hack,
know our small world as if we can weave it all
together, an airy leafy sack.
*
Still, even birds disappear, natural
enemies, poisons, over-extended migration…
wind. Whole populations of red knots
vanish from bleak arctic shores,
the beaches of the Great Lakes
littered with the bodies of loons...
Why?
We know the how. The secret of our poison.
And we have done nothing to remedy that.
*
By now you must have considered
the nature of secrets, the weave of their nexus
and their evasive maneuvers
as if, even if we find them, hold them close,
we can own them.
Our own secrets
the sex calls and broken vows,
the things we are supposed to be ashamed of
the way we cheat or hurry death
and what we imagine others might hate us for
move through the glassy corridors of our union
with the rest of the occupants
of this crowded, quick motion time-lapse
that is called life: pools of blood, escalators
and offal, the jets and screams out of the dark,
the blasts and the secrets dropped
from planes into the watery trenches
as if such disappearance can never be detected
never be known. Never
to know.
*
By now you must have wondered why…
In your remembrances of a starry night, the music
of crickets and cicadas, the rumble
of a distant storm coming over the waters
through the dark, a sunrise
in a valley, somewhere, the hand
of someone you love, secretly
and not so secretly… you have been alive.
*
That is my story Edward. A jumble
and a point of definition, a pathway
on a rocky peninsula
on another rocky peninsula,
up through the hot pine to the place
where all trees disappear
above the shining swirls of far far waters
and little villages that hug their harbors.
A sudden coyote lets me see him
stares and then disappears.
But why?
*
These questions, even that walk,
rose up after my heart gave way
and I lived to swim my daily mile
through the choppy sweet waters
another day.
*
Terrifying, isn't it?
The level of your effect is measured by how much
they want to kill you.
Terrifying?
Perhaps.
Silly too.
What empty regions of space
and hubris
the things they call secrets must contain…
Why do they protect such emptiness?
A defense of what
isn't even there.
*