Parents who have read Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s Goodnight Moon (1947) to their children will experience Kent Johnson’s “Baghdad,” a bitter parody of that wonderful book, as an almost unbearable assault; everything that is orderly, gracious, and tranquil in the book is made jarring in the hallucinatory, war-ravaged Baghdad into which Johnson transposes it. But the transposition is what gives the poem its antiwar edge; war is what turns the beauty of the children’s book into something monstrous, and on that count alone is to be opposed.
Johnson (b. 1955) has spent much of his life in Latin America; he taught in rural Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution. He now lives in Freeport, Illinois, where he has been an instructor in English and Spanish at Highland Community College for the past twenty-five years. He has been a prolific and celebrated poet, editor, and translator, and a figure of some controversy in both literary and political circles; he published a book suggesting that Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” had in fact been written by Kenneth Koch, and his Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War (2005) was among the first books of American poetry to confront the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. “Baghdad” was first published in Sam Hamill’s anthology Poets Against the War in 2003.
Oh, little crown of iron forged to likeness of imam’s face,
what are you doing in this circle of flaming inspectors and bakers?
And little burnt dinner all set to be eaten
(and crispy girl all dressed with scarf for school),
what are you doing near this shovel for dung-digging,
hissing like ice-cubes in ruins of little museum?
And little shell of bank on which flakes of assets fall,
can’t I still withdraw my bonds for baby?
Good night moon.
Good night socks and good night cuckoo clocks.
Good night little bedpans and a trough where once there was an inn
(urn of dashed pride),
what are you doing beside little wheelbarrow
beside some fried chickens?
And you, ridiculous wheels spinning on mailman’s truck,
truck with ashes of letter from crispy girl all dressed with scarf for school,
why do you seem like American experimental poets going nowhere
on little exercise bikes?
Good night barbells and ballet dancer’s shoes
under plastered ceilings of Saddam Music Hall.
Good night bladder of Helen Vendler and a jar from Tennessee.
(though what are these doing here in Baghdad?)
Good night blackened ibis and some keys.
Good night, good night.
(And little mosque popped open like a can, which same as factory of flypaper has blown outward, covering the shape of man with it (with mosque): He stumbles up Martyr’s Promenade. What does it matter who is speaking, he murmurs and mutters, head a little bit on fire. Good night to you too.)
Good night moon.
Good night poor people who shall inherit the moon.
Good night first editions of Das Kapital, Novum Organum,
The Symbolic Affinities between Poetry Blogs and Oil Wells,
and the Koran.
Good night nobody.
Good night Mr. Kent, good night, for now you must
soon wake up and rub your eyes and know that you are dead.