M A R G I E  The American Journal of Poetry     www.margiereview.com

Published Annually in the Fall                                     MARGIE  P. O. BOX 250, CHESTERFIELD, MO 63006-0250

The president is smiling to himself; he loves war

And another one is coming any day now.

At night we can feel the merriment

In government offices and TV studios

With the clatter of tanks rolling out army camps.

The mortuaries are being scrubbed clean.

Soon they’ll be full of grim young men laid out in rows.

Already the crowd gurgles with delight

The bird-sweet deceits, the deep-throated lies

About coming battles and victories.

Dark-clad sharpshooters on rooftops

Scan the esplanade for suspicious pigeons,

Blind men waving their canes in the air,

Girls with short skirts and large bosoms.

Now go to sleep, little dummy, says the ventriloquist.

CHARLES SIMIC has published more than sixty books, amongst them Charon's Cosmology (1977), which was nominated for a National Book Award, Classic Ballroom Dances (1980), which won the Harriet Monroe Award, The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Walking the Black Cat (1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Jackstraws (1999), which was nominated a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. As well as these awards, Simic has been honoured with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As a distinguished translator from various languages, Simic has also twice won the PEN International Translation Award. His most recent publications are his memoir, A Fly in the Soup (2000) and Night Picnic (2001).  Since 1973, Simic has taught in the English Department at the University of New Hampshire.