By Cid Wa’eeb El Sur
“The end is where we start from.” —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding
Upon the heels of an Idlib chemical attack,
about five dozen Tomahawks were hurled back to back.
Like giant, hornet-robots hissing with their striking bombs,
they targeted Shayrat-Base tarmacs, depots, planes—near Homs.
This is “a wake-up call around the World,” John Bolton said,
“when countries enter [in] agreement [now] with the U.S.,
they better honor their commitments.” Russian-run Vesti
proclaimed, “This could be an event that changes history.”
“It is the end of the beginning,” John McCain opined,
“not the beginning of the end,” which will be hard to find.
Cid Wa’eeb El Sur is a poet living in Washington State.
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After the alliterative title, the first two couplets condense the action, figurative language in tow, with three intertwined quotes in iambic hexameters (a violation @ Vesti). Although the quotes, from two Americans and one Russian, are interesting in and of themselves, they are basically unpoetic here. What is Wa’eeb El Sur striving for? Is he, like Turner, attempting to “domesticate burgeoning new vocabularies”?