502 War poems

a sower walks into the great hall it's war out there, he says and you awash in emptiness you've sworn off your duty to sound the alarm I've come in the name of fields it's war out there I walk out from that great hall all four directions a boundless harvest scene I start planning for war rehearsing death and the crops I burn send up the wolf-smoke of warning fires but something haunts me furiously: he's sowing seed across marble floors

For all of my years, I’ve read only living signs— bodies in jealousy, bodies in battle, bodies growing disease like mushroom coral. It is tiresome, tiresome, describing fir cones waiting for fires to catch their human ribs into some slow, future forest. My beloved, he tires of me, and he should— my complaints the same, his recourse the same, invoking the broad, cool sheet suffering drapes over the living freeze of heart after heart, and never by that heart’s fault—the heart did not make itself, the face did not fashion its jutting jawbone to wail across the plains or beg the bare city. I will no longer tally the broken, ospreyed oceans, the figs that outlived summer or the tedious mineral angles and their suction of light. Have you died? Then speak. You must see the living are too small as they are, lonesome for more and in varieties of pain only you can bring into right view.

(from Henry V , spoken by King Henry) Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; Then lend the eye a terrible aspect; Let pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it As fearfully as doth a galled rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean. Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit To his full height. On, on, you noblest English. Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof! Fathers that, like so many Alexanders, Have in these parts from morn till even fought And sheathed their swords for lack of argument: Dishonour not your mothers; now attest That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you. Be copy now to men of grosser blood, And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture; let us swear That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not; For there is none of you so mean and base, That hath not noble lustre in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game's afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'

(from Henry V , spoken by King Henry) This day is called the feast of Crispian: He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars. And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember with advantages What feats he did that day: then shall our names. Familiar in his mouth as household words Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remember’d; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

They splay at a bend of the road, rifles slung, the shadows minimal, their hands tugging their slings by the upper swivel to ease the routine of the march. They have been moving since morning, and over each has descended that singleness, mournful and comatose, which is the mysterious gift of the march. Their helmets shadow their eyes, their chinstraps dangling. In the raddle of grasses their solitude floats in a drift of identities, a common melancholy. A captain enters the frame at the head of his company. His face flashes. With his left hand he tilts back his helmet, while with his right he draws the length of an elbow across forehead and nose, his stained armpits showing dark. A bracelet flashes behind him. The column recedes, rifles close over the canted belts, moving up, the packed backs vulnerable: (Cut) Late afternoon. In the half-light a handful of blazing sticks, four infantrymen heating mess tins over an eddy of smoke, a fifth on his hams, his eyes upcast from the rim of his metal cup. Nearby a corporal works a patch into the chamber of his rifle; he repeats four syllables and smiles sleepily into the camera. The camera moves to the bivouac area; a group, their meat-cans close to their mouths, spooning the compost, Chinese-fashion, and clowning between mouthfuls. Very close. Their jaws, lightly bearded, the necks in their jacket collars strained in an easy horseplay, the Adam’s apples rapidly raised and released in the human exertion of eating. In deep shadow, the light failing, very close. A private tugs at his boot by the toe and the round of the heel. Deliberately, he draws the boot clear of his foot, sets it aside with deep satisfaction, massages his instep over a maternal thickness of socks. He bends toward the other foot, camera-shy, a half smile breaking; (Cut) It is not yet possible to distinguish the forms behind the camouflage netting. They move in the central darkness of the gun, stacking shells and bringing up powder charges. Only the bulk of the howitzer is sure, the gun-barrel crossing the line of the valley under the tented netting. A village is burning in the valley. In the watery light, smoke deepens over three hearthbeds of brightness. A spire. A siding. A ladder of rooftops. The gun fires. The picture trembles. (Cut) An iron darkening. The hip of a tank darkens a frame, foreshortened, the treads close to the lens, a rushing of hammers, rings. The lens is cleared. A cobbled street. A row of country-houses, walled. A rosebush in the heavy light, blown forward. Dust falls in the afterdraft, a grain at a time. The camera is watchful. A rifleman moves up the frame, his rifle at low port, his shadow buffing the cobbles, crouched. He pauses under the rosebush, his rifle hiked. A second figure breaks through the frame, freezing between the foreground and the far doorway. The man under the rosetree sights carefully. The second man listens. He raises his rifle, barrel backwards, and brings the butt down heavily on the door-panels. The rifle rebounds. He measures a second blow, his teeth bared slightly in a reflex of anxiety. His eye is large. The butt-plate smashes over doorknob and lock, the knocker flies upward once, the panel splinters all at once. The man kicks the door open easily with a booted foot. He listens, bent toward his rifle-sights. He signals to the second man and enters the doorway, stooped like a man entering a cave— (Cut) Brightness through trees. A damascene. At the edge of a clearing, a parked jeep. Two medical corpsmen lash litters to the jeep engine a few hundred yards behind front lines. The litter-poles enter the lens over the arch of the engine. On the litter, a swathed head, a shock of broken hair, motionless, a fall of blankets. The stretcher-bearers vault lightly to their seats and move off at a crawl. Roadmarker: Battalion Aid Station. A corner of charred wall, rubble, glass, timber. Legend: Épicerie . The stretcher-bearers dismount. The film is bad. Presently a gloved hand in a surgeon’s sheath, holding a forceps. Briskly the hand moves over a circlet of maimed flesh noosed in a bloody bandage. A scalpel flashes between the living hand and the human hurt, forcing the rind of the wound, filling the frame. The camera submits, framing the wound like a surgeon’s retractor, its gaze nerveless and saline. The gauzes blacken swiftly, too heavy for the jaws of the forceps.... The surgeon at full figure. A breeze finds the fold of his tunic. In the distance the litter-bearers are leaning for the litter-poles. His eyes hold the optical center of the lens, unanswered. His mouth rejects contemplation, not yet relaxed. His hands are void in their glimmering cicatrix of rubber.

I feel the spring far off, far off, The faint, far scent of bud and leaf— Oh, how can spring take heart to come To a world in grief, Deep grief? The sun turns north, the days grow long, Later the evening star grows bright— How can the daylight linger on For men to fight, Still fight? The grass is waking in the ground, Soon it will rise and blow in waves— How can it have the heart to sway Over the graves, New graves? Under the boughs where lovers walked The apple-blooms will shed their breath— But what of all the lovers now Parted by Death, Grey Death?

Halted against the shade of a last hill, They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease And, finding comfortable chests and knees Carelessly slept. But many there stood still To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge, Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world. Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge, For though the summer oozed into their veins Like the injected drug for their bones’ pains, Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass, Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass. Hour after hour they ponder the warm field— And the far valley behind, where the buttercups Had blessed with gold their slow boots coming up, Where even the little brambles would not yield, But clutched and clung to them like sorrowing hands; They breathe like trees unstirred. Till like a cold gust thrilled the little word At which each body and its soul begird And tighten them for battle. No alarms Of bugles, no high flags, no clamorous haste— Only a lift and flare of eyes that faced The sun, like a friend with whom their love is done. O larger shone that smile against the sun,— Mightier than his whose bounty these have spurned. So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together Over an open stretch of herb and heather Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned With fury against them; and soft sudden cups Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space. Of them who running on that last high place Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge, Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge, Some say God caught them even before they fell. But what say such as from existence’ brink Ventured but drave too swift to sink. The few who rushed in the body to enter hell, And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames With superhuman inhumanities, Long-famous glories, immemorial shames— And crawling slowly back, have by degrees Regained cool peaceful air in wonder— Why speak they not of comrades that went under?

All winter long you listened for the boom Of distant cannon wheeled into their place. Sometimes outside beneath a bombers’ moon You stood alone to watch the searchlights trace Their careful webs against the boding sky, While miles away on Munich’s vacant square The bombs lunged down with an unruly cry Whose blast you saw yet could but faintly hear. And might have turned your eyes upon the gleam Of a thousand years of snow, where near the clouds The Alps ride massive to their full extreme, And season after season glacier crowds The dark, persistent smudge of conifers. Or seen beyond the hedge and through the trees The shadowy forms of cattle on the furze, Their dim coats white with mist against the freeze. Or thought instead of other times than these, Of other countries and of other sights: Eternal Venice sinking by degrees Into the very water that she lights; Reflected in canals, the lucid dome Of Maria della Salute at your feet, Her triple spires disfigured by the foam. Remembered in Berlin the parks, the neat Footpaths and lawns, the clean spring foliage, Where just short weeks before, a bomb, unaimed, Released a frightened lion from its cage, Which in the mottled dark that trees enflamed Killed one who hurried homeward from the raid. And by yourself there standing in the chill You must, with so much known, have been afraid And chosen such a mind of constant will, Which, though all time corrode with constant hurt, Remains, until it occupies no space, That which it is; and passionless, inert, Becomes at last no meaning and no place.

Some will call the suicide bomber a coward but seeing him you think only,Hungry, stumbling as he is toward you, to the tent where pilgrims stop to eat and drink. Behind you a woman in a black robe scoops rice with her fingers. Beside her a girl, restless, runs out onto the dusty two-lane road that the bomber now crosses. This is happening at the end of forty days of mourning, the anniversary a martyrdom. The girl returns breathless and the mother gives her a glass of clean water. You watch the ripple down her throat, and out of sunlight the man approaches— his eyes, like yours, are brown. Now you hear someone say,Sit, sit. It is the mother talking to the daughter. And now someone is shouting, and now there is the terrible noise. Every person is a story. You are the man who walked out as he walked in, the bomb went off, and you lived to tell.

It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. “Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” “None,” said that other, “save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled. Now men will go content with what we spoiled. Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress. None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. Courage was mine, and I had mystery; Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. . . .”