You can find it
on album covers, gang-scare
TV shows, and woven into the pattern
of rugs from Central Asia.
It hovers in flocks, always,
over the heads
of media-blast images
of happy revolutionaries.
Shall we say someday — perhaps today —
that it appears to be
more ubiquitous than doves,
or as holy to some
as the tongues of
Pentecostal flames?
It’s
a gun, after all;
a deadly weapon. A simple,
easy, nearly unjammable,
swiftly reproducible
weapon. As common,
it seems, as any
means necessary;
as useful, it seems,
as any other work of our hands.
Dark Matter 
August 25th, 2011 at 2:10 am
In Africa (my Africa), it somehow becomes a symbol of all that might come in the night, clothed in discontent and bloodlust – because we have seen it clear our villages, and erase our easy belief in tomorrow.
There is a monument, in Mozambique, constructed of deconstructed AK’s – a rusting beacon of hope in a country that has not yet been scaped off of the red dirt and made whole again, after the last rounds were fired. I wish that I could find each buried gun – and reshape it into beating hearts and white flowers.
August 25th, 2011 at 9:12 am
I hope the poem doesn’t seem like I’m romanticizing the weapon. Certainly not my intent…just speaking to how iconic it’s become globally, for a whole host of reasons.
I will think of that monument you mentioned for a long time.