The Prize

A book with poems

about Bessie Smith,

Marilyn Monroe,

Queen Elizabeth,

William Tell,

W.B. Yeats,

Ted Hughes,

Sitting Bull,

an otter, a fox, and a hare

won the Pulitzer Prize

in the first year

of the war.

In the second year,

the year of insurgency,

of bridges, corpses,

blindfolds, and dogs,

a poet who wrote

about the only species

that commits suicide

received the prize.

In the year of boycotts

and stained fingertips,

the third of the war,

the prize went

to a retired life insurance executive

who lived on acreage

near the village of Garland,

Nebraska.

Disappearance,

from one life

to another,

was the subject

of the prizewinner

in the year of growing

sectarian violence,

the fourth of the war,

also the year of verdict

and hanging.

In the fifth year,

of surge

and black water,

the civil war continued,

and the prize

was given to a book

about our civil war,

which ended

143 years earlier.

In the sixth year,

the prize was granted

to a poet who wrote a lovely poem

about war, the war

in Europe,

where white men

killed each other

by the millions;

his poem

still mentioned an Arab,

a young man who performs

an act of purification,

removing hair

from his body,

before flying

a plane into an office building,

an act that took place

fifty-eight years after the war

the poem is actually about.

The prize was shared

in the sixth year of the war,

the other book

evoking pleasures

(of family, beaches, and dogs)

and horrors

(of young men

purifying their bodies

with speed

and conviction).

In the seventh year,

the year of ceasefire

and effigy,

the prize was presented

to a book about loss,

memory,

and the continuum of time;

the book was named

after a dog

in the sky.

The war went on,

for eight years now,

and many

soldiers

(300,000)

were returned home,

and many

others

(not soldiers,

too many to count)

were returned

to the earth;

this was the year

of exit strategies,

and a book described as filled

with “little thought-bombs”

won the Pulitzer Prize.

In the year of renaming,

the ninth, a new dawn

replaced freedom,

and the prizewinner

had served

as United States Poet Laureate

in the war’s sixth,

seventh, and eighth years.

The last year,

the year of withdrawal,

the prize was given to a book

named after life

on another planet,

which is a yearning

for another way to live,

which is also

another way to die.

Long after life on Earth

the depleted uranium

in the Tigris

will reach its half-life,

four and a half billion years

after the tenth year of the war,

which is

the end of time.