The Art of Tetman Callis

Words don’t often fail me.  More often, I fail them.  This week, I’m posting to this site a work of poetry I wrote six years ago, called The Book of Lamentations.  I had previously published it to my Yahoo website in 2006, where I took it down after a week or two, and to my Joomla site last year, where I took it down after one day.  It is a work which causes me discomfort.  It will not leave me alone.

My background is military.  I am an American.  It is not my intention to make this website into an overtly political or topical site, but there were aspects of the American government’s invasion and occupation of Iraq which I found appalling.  When George W. Bush and Richard Cheney were re-elected in 2004, I was moved to write what I thought would be a three- or four-page poem about the American servicemen and servicewomen, volunteers all, who were giving their lives in the conflict.  I thought it would take, at most, a few weeks to write.  It ended up taking nine months and going on for scores of pages.  I stopped when I didn’t know what else to do.