During the more than thirty years that George Bailin taught in the New York City high schools, he wrote profusely - monologs, scripts, poems, essays - some of which have been published nationally. Now an adjunct professor at Bergen Community College, his writing has ripened. His language is vibrant, the images striking, the issues extremely relevant. All should heed his message.
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Selections from First Strike
poems by George Bailin

for mikio inoue: survivor at hiroshima

you need to have direction
torn from you,
like your arms, jerked
away ,
to make you cry out,
seeing your wrecked fingers
crack on hard spaces,
sagging, falling
as if they were worn.

you need to see light
fail, wrung out,
the colors leaking
orange and blue, yellow,
fractured, flopping and drag-
ging itself
as if ashamed
that it cannot fill the hollow
city.

it does no good to see
my blood, nor my children
silent, dead,
in photographs.
you must know the break-
ing of your own body,
you must feel the hemor-
rhage from your own nose,
your own ears.
you believe no one.

on the phrase: nuclear exchange

what are you talking about?
what's happened to your brain?
exchange?
as with a box of chocolates
in one hand, offering
with manicured fingers,
and with the other, receiving
a large diamond, coffin-
shaped, as you bow
from your silk-sashed waist?

fraud !
impostor! you? a peace-keeper?
i'm snatching the mask,
its rubber from your pock-
marked face, and there, exposed,
your cheeks, moldy,
your big nose filled
with iron hairs, a greenish-
yellow paste that hardens,
fastens your long teeth together.
you smile missiles,
your big black mouth
a silo,
and the stink of it, the stink,
your whole flesh reeks.
i hate you, your slick way
to please with language!

exchange? i'm pulling off the ribbon
right now from your gift, and there,
there the broken shoulders, the pile
of corpses, their eyes burned,
limbs stiff, raised as in protest.
why the whole world
is like a small dog, struck, bleeding
on a road, dying. and you,
you stand there,
your great indifference,
your flag of fakery unfurled
in a neat wind,
your composure all over you,
like mange.

denials: sham security

bomb shelter?
you don't need one,
for you have pulled the sky
around your head somehow
like a cloche,
a new parisian hat,
you see and hear
nothing but blue velvet
in a soft world!

how have you done it?
the tissue of white
cloud, you harden,
making a blindfold
to plaster your eyes.
cataracts
big as cumulus cause you to smile.
lost in down,
how bold you lie in feathers.

you have changed the air
making the wind
stone, you hide behind it,
saying door,
fortress,
and in your dreams, dress
in dust, in vapors,
seeking protection,
in these vulnerable
wide places -

how will you hide
in this great open
world?

shinzo hamai: 1946

not even one year later,
when many houses looked
mad, the burst walls,
gates leading nowhere,
the roofs gone,
these homes leaning, fallen
like crates abandoned.
not a year from the moment
when the sky horses
ran here,
galloping, the big hoofs
that brightened, forcing
apart the legs of space,
a raping of time
in this universe.
not one year,
this white tree, with thin
twigs, does not remember
that worst day.
it is morning, and very cool.
it is of delicate shape,
it lives.
there, the first blossom
of cherry
appears.

united nations: in reality

i shout,
one world, a single
entity, and let
the fools lurch here and there,
great legged louts
with their enormous flags
which are gross, too huge
ever to unfurl
even in this generous wind!
let them trudge this way,
that way, their banners snapping
across their faces!
let them hurl words
at one another, grow red,
more red with the slaps
of their seals, their charters,
proclamations like maces
in their big hands...
i say, one place!
and i reject that high
art which draws the iron
boundary through our heart,
carves a horrid line
across the face of the sky
and says, yours, mine!
break down these false altars
where they who break us,
who slash our hand-
shakes,
would murder the earth
that has so often
died.

o comrade, o friend
of mine, come quickly
with me.

time machine

a young man in harlem
describes the start of
world war three...

man, you wanna talk
about fast?
you ain't seen speed yet,
you ain't seen nothing yet!
when them bombs move down,
that day
really is gonna move along,
all the time of the world
used up in an hour,

a sunrise every second,
in every place a dawn, fire-
ball over new york, in washington
a bright morning,
and a wake-up there in boston
to gouge out your eyes,

a thousand days
in an instant, and big yellow
skies. a thousand burnings
to break the horizon
right in half,
trash the planet,

and up in the air,
houses, people, the whole
face of the world just smoke.
man, this here flag
of space will flop
half mast, and time itself
will fall down furled.
man, you wanna talk about fast?