Smart Fish Don’t Bite
For John Prados
Only the stupid ones who get caught,
gutted, beheaded, filleted, and eaten
fried or poached or boiled or broiled,
pickled in brine, fed to porpoises raw
at Sea World, canned for family pets.
The smart ones just keep swimming.
You’ll never meet an intelligent fish
because they don’t take the bait,
though they never seem to go hungry.
My friend Gary Metras loves to fish;
ties his own flies, pulls on his waders
and heads for his local river several
times a week, rain or shine, year-round.
Strictly catch-&-release. Lucky fish,
but not very bright. He tells me
he often catches the same fish
multiple times. One of these days,
the guy with the rod won’t be so kind.
This is why we hear about the liars,
hypocrites and crooks like Spiro Agnew,
Richard Nixon, Jimmy Swaggart,
Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried,
and all those other stupid fish who
can’t resist the bait. Ever wonder
what the smart fish are up to,
the ones you never hear about?
Thirteen Reasons to Doubt the Existence of God
I. The cotton gin
II. Manifest Destiny
III. Jim Crow
IV. John D. Rockefeller:
“God gave me my money!”
V. Woodrow Wilson:
Self-determination for all peoples and all nations
so long as they’re white northern European Protestants;
the rest of you can go piss up a rope.
VI. Comrade Stalin
VII. Der Fuhrer
VIII. The Holocaust
IX. The Holy Land
X. The Atom Bomb
XI. Henry Kissinger
XII. Fox News
XIII. Thy will be done:
Seriously?
This is all part of some Master Plan?
You’re joking, right?
The Uselessness of Words
for the innocent in Gaza,
the Occupied Territories,
and throughout the world
How does one respond to such destruction
with a poem? Can poetry outweigh
a 2,000-pound Mark-84 bomb,
save the life of a single wounded child,
put an end to the hatred and madness
and inhumanity of those who do
the butchery? Might just as well be
pissing up a rope as thinking poetry
can matter where it really counts
there among the dead and dying,
armless, legless, homeless, starving,
families shattered, orphaned children,
misery without hope of ever ending.
And here I sit in safety half a world
away. My tax dollars buying bombs
my government supplies to those who
do the killing. How can one be silent
in the face of such ignoble cruelty?
How can one just turn away as if
it wasn’t happening, as if I weren’t
responsible, as if I didn’t care.
I suppose I could refuse to pay
my taxes, get myself arrested
doing civil disobedience
in front of Independence Hall,
write letters to my representatives
in Congress. But we’ve done all that
and more for more than half a century
and yet the killing just goes on and on.
One finds it hard, indeed impossible,
to dodge concluding that humanity
is, taken on the whole, just inhumane,
stark raving mad, beyond redemption.
I’d like to think I’m wrong, but this poem
is all the evidence that I can offer.
W. D. Ehrhart is a Vietnam War veteran, a dedicated anti-war activist, and the author of the memoir Vietnam-Perkasie, among other books. He’s also a regular contributor of nonfiction articles to Current Affairs, and the first poet to be published in its pages. His new poetry collection, Smart Fish Don’t Bite, is available from Moonstone Press, and we highly recommend you check it out:
