In the early quatrains of “Rubaiyat,” a poem in Lawrence Joseph's fourth book, into it, The poet adopts a curious perspective for an American poet of Arab ancestry who is intensely critical of American military aggression. Taking on the “eye” of the aggressor, he pulls up the “satellite image of a major / military target, a 3-D journey / into a landscape of hills and valleys.” He follows the lens as it zooms closer to the ground:
Zoom in close enough—the shadows
of statues, the swimming pools of palaces …
closer—a garden of palm trees,
oranges and lemons, chickens, sheep. … (41)