“Quack! Quack!” they say Quack! Quack!
“Out of Iraq,” we yell back to those ducks
that is the giant flour wheeled amphibians
that ply the tourist trade all around Boston
Historic sites if not sights and we are just
the promulgators and the disseminators of
the “free speech” of that first amendment
like my fifth great grandfather who wrote
Tracts for committees of correspondence
and he thought Patrick Henry was show-off
big mouth stealing the thunder from a true
patriot of freedom and liberty even as the
WW II landing craft crew still yell “Quack!”
“Quack!” as the U.S. (us) again bombs Iraq.
James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.