 I'm very interested in the nature of violence and culture. And is it inevitable that culture must be founded on violence? If that's inevitable, I don't know what it means. Does the practice of the word, which is the practice of civilizing function of the dynamism of opposites? That's how the Chinese defined the word, the logos, the Tai-Gi principle, the dynamism of opposites. Heraclitus called it the strife and harmony of opposites. The writer of the John Gospel called it the word. And so the practice of the word is the practice of dynamism of opposites, which is the founding principle of all manifest reality, physical and psychological. The question is, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the myth goes, Cain kills Abel and builds the first human city. In the Latin tradition, Romulus kills Vimus and builds the first Roman city, implying that all first cities are built by murderers. Is that necessity? That all culture is maintained by murder, pillage, colonization, you name it. But I don't know, or is it that when we lose touch with the word, the logos, that's what happens? I can't decide which is the truth. In this poem, I'm trying to understand that. And I was born in 1957. And it turned out in 1957, there was the largest Congress of Third World countries in my birthplace, Jakarta, Indonesia. And I always romanticized that and didn't realize, in fact, what a kind of violent, what kind of violence that Congress emerged out of. This is a poem about that sense and the feeling of being bereft of the word, OK, changing places in the fire. What's the word? She cries from her purchase on the iron finial of the front gate to my heart. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. The capitals of the world are burning. And this sparrow with a woman's face roars in the burdened air, air crowded with voices, but no word. Mobbed with talking, but no word. Teaming with speech, but no word. This woman with the body of a bird is shrieking fierce, buzzed, vaults in a swarming babble. What's the word? This evening is the year of my birth. The country has just gained its independence. Social unrest grows rampant as the economy declines. Under a corrupt government of the army and the rich come years of mass poverty, decades of starving children, and racially fueled mayhem. Word is armed squads raping women by the hundreds. Word is beheadings, public lynchings, and riots. Word is burning, looting, curfews, and shoot to kill orders. And word is more deadly days lie ahead. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday. The forecast calls for more misery, more poverty, more starvation, more families fleeing their homes, more refugees streaming toward every border. More horror is to come. That's the word. More scapegoating is to come. That's the word. More violence is to come on the roads, in the streets, in the homes, violence in the churches, in the temples, where they preach who to love and who to hate, how to get to heaven and who to leave behind, how to dawn the fleece of the blameless and prosecute your neighbor. All against all is to come. That's the word. Who hasn't heard that? She spits. You call yourself a poet. You tame high finisher of paltry blots. You publish doubt and call it knowledge. You destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify your envy. You murder benevolence and virtue with condescension. You pretend to poetry and destroy imagination. Your words mystify, mislead, and misdirect. You ape the word made flesh with words made words to multiply more words and words about your words. And you ritualize these sterile pleasures. Miming joy, delight, and generation. You celebrate cheap distractions. Your theories bloom in suicide of the mind. Starvation of the heart and mass maladies of the soul. You mock and mimic sincerity. You read and divine by irony. You snare the little ones. You pose stumbling blocks to the lame. You dig pits for the blind. You sell desolation. Your science is despair. What's the word? I can tell she's up to no good. This feathered interval, monument to the nano, this deciding gram, my Geronimo. She's out to overturn an empire to usurp principalities and powers just by swooping into the right assembly, perplexing a Senate, baffling a parliament, or bewildering somebody's crosshairs, not worth a farthing and without a cent. She would own the realm her shrill cries measure, trading, dying for being. It's not there, thank you.