Opossum Blues

E.J. Dionne predicted that he administration and the Democratic Party
weren’t dead. So I liked that, even though we looked dead.
BILL CLINTON in Booknotes edited by Brian Lamb (Times Book, 1997)


I don’t know about you

but when I was young,

playing dead was another

way of stopping the game.

It wasn’t as dignified as saying,

‘I quit.’ But it served the same

purpose. Pretending

you were dead was like

quitting for a long time,

like telling the other person

that you didn’t feel like

playing again until you

were alive which might

take forever. In fact,

you knew of no one

who died and came back,

except Lazarus in the Bible,

But that didn’t count.

Because it was literature.

And what you were doing

wasn’t literature yet,

because no one thought

of writing it down.



Hooray For The Red, White And Tin

I came back from the war, and it seemed to me
that the American people believe this was a very
quick and easy war. It was antiseptic. It was surgical.
You saw the missles coming through the front doors
of the warehouse, hitting everything just perfectly.
The war I saw was nothing like that.
MOLLY MOORE in ‘Booknotes’ edited by Brian Lamb (Times Books, 1997)


The war I staged in my bedroom

with tin solders against plastic ones

was solely decided by how I felt

that day. If I felt like tin,

my thoughts weighing me down,

the tin soldiers had the advantage.

But if I felt like rubber, I could

stretch myself to fit into any situation

I encountered that day, the rubber

soldiers were victorious. In the end,

even though pieces of tin arms

and legs were put away if I

ever felt like repairing them,

the tin soldiers won most often.

If you can’t fit in, you go with tin.

Bio: Hal Sirowitz is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. He's the author of 4 poetry books with another one forthcoming.