A Surviving Maduro Guard Speaks
A guard who was protecting Nicolás Maduro said:
“We did not hear the Yankees coming. No, we were not dead.
Th’ Americans possessed high-tech that we had never seen;
they took off-line all that we used—radar…everything.
The US used drones, taking out our bases and defense.
They only had eight helicopters, maybe twenty men.
But what those twenty men did…to this moment truly stuns:
it seemed three hundred rounds per minute issued from their guns.
Unlike no thing that we had seen, they sent a SHOCK-BOOM out;
we fell down to our knees and vomited blood—nose and mouth.
We were immediately incapacitated then.
No matter what, we never want to go through that again.
We’re warning you, drug-traffickers, be careful what you do.
We’re not now saying, if you want us, come get us. No. Don’t.”
Bruce Dale Wise is a poet and former English teacher currently residing in Texas.
Bruce, what a great description of taking out Maduro! Worthy subject for such insight that hopefully brings long-term change.
This is a strange poem that draws from an interview between two anti-American figures,
an interviewer and an interviewee. Here is no evil Macbeth speaking his mind internally, but rather an ordinary guard in the language of the Realists, plain, flat, and with the images that came to his mind of this event that occurred in Caracas during the extraction of Nicolás Maduro from his protective ring.
It seems odd to refer to this piece as a “worthy subject”, as Mr. Peterson has noted; yet, how would one refer to it? It is simply one more piece of writing in that long line of works from the Ancient Greeks to the NewMillennials, and hardly even more than one incident, certainly without the power of Simonides on the men who died at Thermopylae, where one can hear Leonidas’ response to Xerxes when he says Μολών λαβé.
Truly stunning, Bruce. There are a few instances in history where a few men and the best equipment manage to incapacitate enemies. The SHOCK-BOOM makes it seem as if Americans have developed an extraordinary weapon of the kind imagined in fantasy. Your account is fittingly presented in your favored line, successfully developed after numerous experiments.
As Ms. Coats notes, “Your account is fittingly presented in your favored line…” id est, the iambic heptameter; and this is partly so because I am being drawn to narrative, as part of the present World literary Zeitgeist.
One reason I was interested in this interview, as perhaps was Mr. Peterson, was that it did imply extraordinary planning and ‘the best equipment managed to incapacitate an enemy with an extraordinary weapon’. Of course, this is “my account”, as I have added phrases here and there from the original Spanish, and did lay this docupoem out, although it draws entirely from reactuality [sic].
But how was I to translate that shocking boom? I altered type and made it spondaic, to violate the line. The only other metric break [down] comes in the final couplet, each line with its own monosyllabic rhyme-pair. I became more satisfied with the poem as time went on, for I felt as if I had landed in a drama of Aeschylus, id est, “The Persians”, and that was not my intention; since I was using Shelley in the form of his 14-lined “Ozymandias”, as a gossamere [sic] backdrop.
The marriage of technology and technique produces awesome offspring, something that makes tinhorn dictators shake in their boots. I wonder what Maduro had for supper last night. Probably not the fare he had become accustomed to.
Indeed.
“The Discombobulator. I’m not allowed to talk about it.”
–Donald J. Trump