Consulting an Elder Poet on an Anti-War Poem

for Elizabeth Bishop You said to me that day, “There’s nothing you can do,” and spoke of Auden’s line: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” And though I honor you, especially your poems, the objects you dipped in light, then, left in the rainbow, let slip from our sight, I admitted, diving out of self, a sweet woman’s white caress, the hundreds of lives and places in books, failed to counter confusion. You did agree that it was Socrates who said to his Athenian friends that governments are only governments with many heads and cannot think as one. That history continues to show how they swing from war to peace and back again, in one wide gallow-sweep just as the pendulum of the world’s clocks returned its towns to craters. Now I must ask myself, fifteen cobalt-blue years later, if the dust of each new war that settles in our bones, and deadens a generation, is no more than negatives of the Kennedys, King, and Lennon, has less weight than what we felt the day the Apollo spaceship landed on the moon, and Auden’s line is true, then why did you to the end, live with the dark, sing into your ruin?