How can there be a war going on
when the window I look out is suffused
in morning sunlight, and one tall pine
after another marches into the drowsy
distance? Where is this so-called war?

Certainly not here. Certainly no one
I know squats under the scream and wheeze
of artillery, trembles with a premonition
of ambush just over the next sandy rise
or steers with skill the heavy machinery of war.

And no one I know cowers underground
and counts seconds between the whining throes
of falling bombs, holding close the children —
a word which by itself cries out the pathos of peace
and the absolute calamity of war.

Oh, look! A funny squirrel has found the corn
we left for finches to eat. And overhead, crows
circle, take off and land freely all around.
Somewhere far away there is an indistinct noise —
traffic along a busy highway. Not war.

–J. Kates,
Metes and Bounds (2010)
Accents Publishing

J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry in 1984 and a Translation Project Fellowship in 2006, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts in 1995. He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of three books of Latin American poetry, and has a chapbook of his own poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River).