Speaking of whether or not poetry can change the world, I couldn’t help but repost Salah al Hamdani’s “Baghdad, Mon Amour” as our poem of the week. If any one poet can make a difference, it’s someone like al Hamdani, who began writing in his twenties, while imprisoned for his opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime. He’s been living as an exile in France since 1975. Thirty years after having to flee his homeland, he remains a steadfast anti-war voice, opposing even the removal of the dictator who caused him so much hardship.

There’s nothing we’ve done at Rattle that I’m more proud of than publishing “Baghdad, Mon Amour”–scrambling to find a translator at Sam Hamill’s suggestion, and squeezing it in to the seemingly random Poets Writing Abroad tribute. Molly Deschenes translated the piece in a matter of days, and though she claims not to be a poet herself, her ear for the musicality of language says otherwise. The poem has since been translated by C. Dickson, but I still prefer Molly’s less-embellished version.

As powerful as the poem is, as grateful as I am for the opportunity to share it with an American audience, I’m still unconvinced of its impact. If we took out a full page ad and featured it in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, then put up billboards of the poem on the highways, if we tied the war-mongers to a chair and made them read the poem over and over again until they could recite it in a drugged stupor–would anything come of it?

I doubt it. Those inclined to agree with al Hamdani would nod along, store it affectionately in the corner of their hearts, maybe read it to a friend. The friend might show another friend, and maybe there’s a wave of more eloquent pacifism. The greedy xenophobes and those regulated by fear would see only words on a page, and excuse away whatever love or logic they stoop to understand. But nothing else.

And if we didn’t go out of our way to give the poem an audience, if some pimply college student had miraculously written it for a class and posted it on his blog, we wouldn’t even see that meager result. Poems don’t spread on their own, not in today’s age of the sound byte, if they ever did.

Of course, in other countries, in other times, poets have been jailed for their politics, some of their families even murdered. But I’d still argue that it’s the poets, and not the poems themselves, that are sometimes a threat to the establishment. It’s the poets’ intelligence, and passion, and their ability to speak for and mobilize a crowd. It’s Salah al Hamdani and Sam Hamill and Jon Andersen and Anna Akhmatova. Not necessarily what they wrote, but how they wrote it, what they did with it thereafter.

Or maybe there is a subtle effect, en masse, on the receptive end. Ignorance and oppression go hand-in-hand. Having the words to understand and communicate your thoughts is a powerful thing. So, too, is the focused attention and fine perception of a poem.

This is where, in my mind, poetry becomes one of the most important things we can pursue. It’s the subject of one of my favorite books, Erik Campbell’s Arguments for Stillness — a way of using that word made suddenly popular by Oprah’s new dreadful sensation Eckhart Tolle. That focused attention, that empathetic concentration, can be seen as the greatest thing that’s missing in modern society. The Buddhists call it enlightenment; new-agers like Tolle call it awakening a new consciousness. Either way, it’s the critical component in moving beyond things like war and greed — and nothing embodies it better than poetry.

I really believe that if we all read poetry, we’d all be better people–that falling in love with poetry is its own kind of awakening. So maybe the poems themselves really can change the world, as a conduit of goodness. If that’s the case, “Baghdad, Mon Amour” is a great conductor. But even if it’s not, Salah al Hamdani is pure lightning.