☀ Today's Poem: "The Inheritance of Intelligence" Caitlin Roach

Today's Headline: "Yale Library Awards 2 Prizes Honoring the Highest Achievement in American Poetry"

February 16, 2025 The Inheritance of Intelligence Caitlin Roach It was just point and click. — Brandon Bryant, former U.S. drone operator When I said the doe I meant the people. When I said the buck I meant they're coming for our throats. When she stopped running the buck heard permit when all she meant is I give up. Not an offering but surrender. So much is lost in translation or else just overlooked. In a free Arabic course offered by an institution of higher education dubbed a feeder for Agency the instructor misspoke: there are tanks coming in translated as an onset of fog is approaching. It doesn't have to be exact just near. Ten thousand miles away in a chair at a screen in a box wait can be read as fire. Before any strike is taken Barack Obama there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed as the law bends to fit what it must, so a signature—not bound to identity but merely a fitting-into what at least one deems a sketch looking something like terror. Blots bleeding in disordered procession, moving nothing like the ant's measured turn at each step, are taken down in tens it is the highest standard we can set— Barack Obama did I say tens? I mean ten times that. What we deem room for error. What we deem near. The people are told the people are at threat and they believe it. Each time I turn to look out the window I’m tricked into thinking the light at the tip of the wing on the plane is a moon, and on the topic of skies, so determined is the fate of a star by its mass. Small ones live long and die quiet deaths like the red dwarfs that shine feebly for trillions of years before collapsing in to a white one. Right now, tomorrow, in Egypt John. O. Brennan I took the body of a man named Mohamed whose hand drew from me what it wanted, what I let it, a long arm fished for market figs in a pail even before a throat spoke. We turned in red blooms at the shore that kept the sons of Jacob I was told and all that telling had me roused to be blessed by a hand heir to some holiness. I never wanted the hand, the inheritance it held, but had not a body to refuse it. What happened with the Arab Spring, that wave John. O. Brennan of instability that swept across the Middle East, started with a Tunisian fruit salesman who self-immolated after police confiscated for no reason but torment his cart holding the two hundred dollars’ worth of fruit he contracted in debt the day before to keep carrying his mother and uncle and siblings on the one hundred forty U.S. dollars he made per month selling produce on the streets of Sidi Bouzid. Early that day in the middle of December his decade-long struggle to survive finally collapsed when he hadn’t the money to bribe them. An hour later, in the middle of traffic, outside where the governor sat refusing to hear his complaint, he went to a nearby station, filled a can with gasoline, returned to the street, and shouted how do you expect me to make a living? Mohamed Bouazizi then set himself alight with a match and last night in America another mosque was set ablaze. That was the spark John. O. Brennan that set off the forest fire. In the forest, the doe freezes in fear when she is spotted in the scope. Identities are caused by performative actions the actor and audience form together, thus the hunter cannot be so without the doe. Without her he becomes what. No, not becomes, is. Is another body in the field. I mean the ground. The tricks the eyes will do.We react towhat we believe to be the facts. In the forest John. O. Brennan a doe’s bellowing flushes a buck from the fog into the clearing to cross to her. With near certainty it is her and not the mouth of a man calling her, he acts. Point and click. Intelligence Vicki Divoll isn’t evidence, anyone who’s worked in intelligence knows that. The branches of fire coral grow how they must to minimize their exposure to waves. The yellowtail damselfish dwells in its arms and retreats to its heat when threatened, as its onset of fog approaches. Don’t you know the will to ward off is never enough, nor the ward itself. One must strike before will to ward is born, before the body becomes, before it moves toward, umbilical to the sovereign. Said the agent. What kind of repression do you think it takes sister of Mohamed Bouazizi for a young man to do this? I do not need to know God to know these men would wring the small necks of children if they stood on what they lusted. The man never named him. Never called him Mohamed, never so much as neared what brought him to die. Just sat in his chair on the stage, flashing his teeth to the people charmed by his hunger, the people becoming the people who sit in a chair at a screen in a box in a desert like this one. Not fruit. Meat yanked fresh from a mollusk and dangling at a wet beak. Not streets, a wellspring. Not a salesman, a godwit. The fog lifts. You're cleared hot. The safety observer permission to strike stands behind a pair of shoulders, counting down to zero from ten, then shouts SPLASH when the dark collapses into light. from the book SURVEILLE / University of Wisconsin Press READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward This poem was written after a recruitment presentation I attended given by outgoing CIA director John O. Brennan, in November 2016, two days after Donald Trump was elected 45th president of the United States. It was held at the University of New Mexico where the CIA had launched its Signature School Program—the first of its kind in the nation. The language attributed to John O. Brennan that appears in the poem was spoken by him during that recruitment presentation. Caitlin Roach on "The Inheritance of Intelligence" Yale Library Honors the Highest Achievement in American Poetry "Arthur Sze, the winner of the 54th Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, is a poet, translator, and editor. The Bollingen Prize recognizes Sze’s lifetime achievement in the field....Major Jackson is the first recipient of the newly created Patricia Cannon Willis Prize for American Poetry. This book prize recognizes Jackson for his collection Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002–2022, published by W. W. Norton in 2023. The prize includes a cash award of $25,000." viaYALE LIBRARY READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES What Sparks Poetry: Farid Matuk on Language as Form "I wanted this work to be accountable, to not settle for easy truisms about ambiguity or a lack of closure being liberatory or even interesting. I wanted, more than I had before, to risk being right or wrong or foolish or earnest or stylized. I don't know who to face, but in wanting to be accountable the poems call—a bit desperately, really—to readers I can't yet see. My ambition was to create across each poem and again across the book a complex of feelings, sometimes contradictory feelings, that would get at what's irreconcilable about the real." READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE donate View in browser You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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