“KM4” Poems & Drawings by Tom Sleigh and Michael Hafftka

The little man carved out of bone

shouts something to the world the world can’t hear.

All around him the roads, lost in drifted, deep red sand,

die out in sun just clearing the plain.

Dried out, faded, he makes an invocation at an altar:

an AK-47 stood up on its butt end in a pile of rock.

The AK talks the talk of what guns talk—

not rage or death or clichés of killing,

but specifics of what it means to be fired off in the air.

No fear when it jams, no enemy running away,

no feeling like a river overflowing in a cloudburst—

forget all that: the little man of bone is not the streaming head

of the rivergod roaring at Achilles; nor dead Patroclos

complaining in a dream how Achilles has forgotten him.

The AK wants to tell a different truth—

a truth ungarbled that is so obvious

no one could possibly mistake its meaning.

If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrel

what you’ll see is a boy with trousers

rolled above his ankles.

You’ll see a mouth of bone moving in syllables

that have the rapid-fire clarity

of a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute.