Author: RL Greenfield
Location: Santa Monica, California

RL Greenfield received a National Endowment of The Arts fellowship in literature in 1995 and that year created a television program in Santa Barbara, Californa, The Greenfield Code, dedicated to literature and contemporary themes. Greenfield produced and hosted 150 one-hour programs with writers & artists as guests -- many of them distinguished national and local poets. Seven of those programs featured in-depth analysis and filmed materials revealing unreported savagery taking place in Iraq in the nineties. Greenfield's poems and prose are in at least 60 literary reviews here and abroad.

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To the Murdered Foal of the Masters of War

Children, I have no tears for you
No elegies roll down the pikes of my

spine to lament your lost nubility
in this arid republic of doom & dice

I have no memories of your mothers
& fathers locking their loins in ecstasy

for your beginning massacre:
You never lived in the land of the free

& the home of the braggarts: no,
you never walked the streets of Laredo

fully formed or ate & drank with Jesus
at the Continental Divide in Paris, France

nor did you squawk in the tree of
Christmas with the twin malefactors

Tweedle-dee & Tweedle-dum
You were born to live a five-minute

existence & then turn politely without
disgust into the circle of dust

that signed your name without
asking your permission: I stood

alone at the far edges of your funeral
& watched the crowd grimace &

squint into the blinding sunlight
& at dusk they waved their shining

bottles of champagne to heaven
all the while wearing tuxedos & white

gloves no doubt to commemorate
the crowning jewel of American finance

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