502 War poems

I love you, great new Titan! Am I not you? Napoleon and Caesar Out of you grew. Out of unthinkable torture, Eyes kissed by death, Won back to the world again, Lost and won in a breath, Cruel men are made immortal. Out of your pain born, They have stolen the sun's power With their feet on your shoulders worn. Let them shrink from your girth, That has outgrown the pallid days When you slept like Circe's swine Or a word in the brain's ways.

Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me. Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,) His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be; Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us. We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d, My captain lash’d fast with his own hands. We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water, On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead. Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark, Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported, The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the after-hold to give them a chance for themselves. The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels, They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust. Our frigate takes fire, The other asks if we demand quarter? If our colors are struck and the fighting done? Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain, We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting. Only three guns are in use, One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s mainmast, Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks. The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top, They hold out bravely during the whole of the action. Not a moment’s cease, The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine. One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking. Serene stands the little captain, He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low, His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns. Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us.

Stretch’d and still lies the midnight, Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness, Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d, The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet, Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin, The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers, The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below, The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty, Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars, Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, slight shock of the soothe of waves, Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent, A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining, Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors, The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw, Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan, These so, these irretrievable.

for my wife After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding, We stood in the doorway watching horses Walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill. We stared through the black screen, Our vision altered by the distance So I thought I saw a mist Kicked up around their hooves when they faded Like cut-out horses Away from us. The grass was never more blue in that light, more Scarlet; beyond the pasture Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches Crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire But you said they were only branches. Okay. The storm stopped pounding. I am trying to say this straight: for once I was sane enough to pause and breathe Outside my wild plans and after the hard rain I turned my back on the old curses. I believed They swung finally away from me ... But still the branches are wire And thunder is the pounding mortar, Still I close my eyes and see the girl Running from her village, napalm Stuck to her dress like jelly, Her hands reaching for the no one Who waits in waves of heat before her. So I can keep on living, So I can stay here beside you, I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings Beat inside her until she rises Above the stinking jungle and her pain Eases, and your pain, and mine. But the lie swings back again. The lie works only as long as it takes to speak And the girl runs only as far As the napalm allows Until her burning tendons and crackling Muscles draw her up into that final position Burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes And not your good love and not the rain-swept air And not the jungle green Pasture unfolding before us can deny it.

When God appears before me he is a burning woman tied to a bush. Her nakedness, a missed spot on a busy canvas, where a male hand has been practicing female gestures. For instance, hanging herself like laundry over her own arm. Nipple-colons introduce this scene of medieval war: horses crowned with riders are leaving; horses’ tails, like a clock’s hands, whip flies of hours off their round thighs. Time is an insect that leaves its maggots to hatch on an open wound of a mammal. There’s more face on these thighs than on all of the women’s bodies. One, with an arrow aimed at her, hands on her bent knees as if she wanted to ski into death like a scared child, mocks the splendid horse tails with hair so red, all of her blood must have gone into it. So, it isn’t a bush on fire. It’s red hair she used as a shield. In the distance, a town burning. Impatiently, horses whip buzzing ashes. The end.

I cover the eyes of Gena, 7, and Anushka, 2, as their father drops his trousers to be searched, and his flesh shakes, and around him: silence’s gross belly flaps. The crowd watches. The children watch us watch: soldiers drag the naked man up the staircase. I teach his children’s hands to make of anguish a language — see how deafness nails us into our bodies. Anushka speaks to homeless dogs as if they are men, speaks to men as if they are men and not just souls on crutches of bone. Townspeople watch children but feel under the bare feet of their thoughts the cold stone of the city.

Achilles slays the man who slayed his friend, pierces the corpse behind the heels and drags it behind his chariot like the cans that trail a bride and groom. Then he lays out a banquet for his men, oxen and goats and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards. The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—

While my husband packed to fly back to Vietnam, this time as a tourist instead of a soldier, I drove to the zoo to say goodbye to the musk oxen who were being shipped out early next morning to Tacoma. We were getting lions instead. When I got there, it was too easy to park. The zoo was closing early so they wouldn’t let me in. I went back to my car and slid into the driver’s seat. Sobs tore from deep in my chest, I who had never seen a musk ox and never cared until now.

We rise from the snow where we’ve lain on our backs and flown like children, from the imprint of perfect wings and cold gowns, and we stagger together wine-breathed into town where our people are building their armies again, short years after body bags, after burnings. There is a man I’ve come to love after thirty, and we have our rituals of coffee, of airports, regret. After love we smoke and sleep with magazines, two shot glasses and the black and white collapse of hours. In what time do we live that it is too late to have children? In what place that we consider the various ways to leave? There is no list long enough for a selective service card shriveling under a match, the prison that comes of it, a flag in the wind eaten from its pole and boys sent back in trash bags. We’ll tell you. You were at that time learning fractions. We’ll tell you about fractions. Half of us are dead or quiet or lost. Let them speak for themselves. We lie down in the fields and leave behind the corpses of angels.

Born in a safe family But a dangerous area, Iraq, I heard guns at a young age, so young They made a decision to raise us safe So packed our things And went far away. Now, in the city of rain, I try to forget my past, But memories never fade. This is my life, It happened for a reason, I happened for a reason.