I joined a haiku mailing list on the internet recently, it's kind of a workshop, discussion group. It's been fun, but a bit time consuming. Then something interesting happened. We started getting posts from Serbia and the Balkans. A man named Dimitar Anakiev, who edits three haiku journals in the Balkans. He offered:

spring evening--
the wheel of a troop carrier
crushes a lizard

Then he gave us a haiku written in English by a man named Vid Vukasovich. Vukasovich wrote his poem while waiting in a Belgrade bomb shelter:

instead of wishing stars
this starry night of March
the NATO rockets

There was more in these two poems for me than hours of CNN, MSNBC, the networks or the newspapers have offered, or probably will. I don't have much to say about these little poems, but then it's probably overkill to explicate a three-line work. But there is a humanity here that I think we forget. But consider the phrase "Serbian poets." Consider the phrases "Serbian intellectuals" or "Serbian students" or even "Retro-dressed-post-grunge-Serbian-Swing-Dancing-heshers." My God, these people are almost people.

Not to mention that our policies aren't going to work. There was a picture released after our stealth bomber went down of Serbian women dancing on the wrecked wing of the plane. They're not mad at "strong man dictator" Slobodon Milosevic, they're mad at us. Of course they are. Milosevic isn't bombing them. The Serbs don't want to overthrow Milosevic, they want us to go away. Because we're bombing them. That can't be stressed enough. The Serbs don't like us because we're blowing them up.

I'd also like to point out that in the 1980's, the Kosovars were considered the brutal jerks and the Serbs were the victims who we wanted to help (the Soviet Union wouldn't let us near the place, though). We commonly described the Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorists." So, we're being totally inconsistent with our history. Again.

We can't let the Serbs ethnically cleanse everything in sight. But I also don't buy the argument that Milosevic is Hitler, and I seriously doubt he's going to March on Poland and France next. We're not some white knight out to save the Serbs for humanitarian reasons. We're there because our European neighbors have gotten panicky, we're there to prove to Russia that NATO forces don't have to stay western Europe anymore. This is all about spheres of influence.

An e-mail from Jasminka Djordjevic, responding to a discussion about war-time poetry read, "What is this: I am sitting and watching, house is burning, I am sitting and watching... roses, weeds, ...house is burning. Something is wrong."

But I think we should end with Jasminka's artistic lament: "I haven't words for haiku, everything is so awful, nature is all around, but no time, no place for writing haiku. In this moment is starting the alarm (sorry for my English) people goes underground... to shelter, to basement, to... sorry if it looks heartbreaking, it is my reality."

Michael Maiello does not practice haiku himself. He prefers tetraglycemic postulation.