502 War poems

After Walt Whitman A last formality is running late, as a life can't, this hot day. The final ethereal glow of the sun seems to come up from underfoot in this parkland of polysyllabic death. These deep graves, two this time, neatly cut into the earth, await the arrivals, and two adjacent heaps of damp fertile glebe are half blanketed by reticent dark tarpaulins. After the full moon's first moments of horizon-magnified fact and risen largesse, it has contracted as our heaven has passed it by and now it floats above the crowns of the inky trees and well beyond bare roofs. It has always been an entity born dead—not a phantom, as must be this son, a muddy part of whom soared from cratered waste lands far away before landing here, and also this veteran father, whose heart staggered into an ER and failed after he heard what circumstance had done to his one boy. No horses—hearses, the first two cars. A corps of six men— they bear the heavy coffined corpse of the father toward his very small opening in the planet; and six more envoys of duty, with much-practiced attentiveness, slow-step the light son, an imperfect cadaver with handles, to his own last place. White gloves lift up the draped famed cloth, super-striped and starry, from the younger casket, fold it just so— hands with hands over hands in ritual honor, a ceremony neither of mystical creed nor of doubter's midnights—then they advance it to the one who remains. She's looking away from her burials, down at the blades of moon grass. She feels no great gut blows from startled convulsive big drums that shake the spirits of mourners, nor any whirring of equally perilous small drums that might reduce the silence. The son is submitted as lifeless organism to dirt; the father’s remains descend into his pit alongside, likewise on tightly held ropes men slowly let slip. (In foremost ranks of a final unbecoming these two fell alike.) The ropes snake back up into what's left of natural light— remainder of the ancient calculus of day and night. From a boom box ten paces away, the familiar bugled notes say that the journey of these remains is done. Even if no grief shadows the bugler, bugles do sound it, word it—that unacceptable sentence of slow notes. Distant, on overtime, respectful, yet much too near, a stranger waits to start up a backhoe. On such occasions, after courage of soldiers or folly of command or cold wrong purposes among patriarchs, lords, kings, and freed madness in red valleys, mountains, cities, villages, in schools, shrines, sheds, beds, mud-brick hearts, we have offered up our mortally wounded, un- comprehending remembrance. We look down or away and notice the impassive grass under our bloody weight.

All that's left is the shroud the back wings. Roaches scurrying in the kitchen. There’s no greater threat than this time at hand. Drunken cackles from the street. Still damp from 4 AM rain. I missed the instructions for this part. The trap. The deflate of dream. Utopia was always supposed to be right at hand. Right and left. Any which way we’d make of it. Marine layer won’t budge for the rumble under our feet. Sky tears open in the north. Sirens on high. A small pool forms in the buckle of asphalt. In its gentle tremble the reflection of the grey white mass overhead with a perfect seam of blue. The rift where the dead speak how-tos.

1 After our march from the Hudson to the top of Cemetery Hill, we Boy Scouts proudly endured the sermons and hot sun while Girl Scouts lolled among graves in the maple shade. When members of the veterans’ honor guard aimed their bone-white rifles skyward and fired, I glimpsed beneath one metal helmet the salmon-pink flesh of Mr. Webber’s nose, restored after shrapnel tore it. 2 Friends who sat near me in school died in Asia, now lie here under new stones that small flags flap beside. It’s fifth-grade recess: war stories. Mr. Webber stands before us and plucks his glass eye from its socket, holds it high between finger and thumb. The girls giggle and scream; the awed boys gape. The fancy pocket watch he looted from a shop in Germany ticks on its chain.

After Hasior They fired a bullet into the head of each question, trying to kill Kant’s unending argument with Hegel. They burned laws, moral codes, & the Golden Means. Anyone serving tea & cookies to Death, looking or acting as if he knew love, stood before the firing squad. All questions had to go. Pronoun or noun. If it crawled on busted kneecaps, whimpering & begging for mercy, it was still half of a question. *     *     * The little skyscraper of glass boxes sunlight strikes the same time of day at a certain angle outside Zakopane looks like condos where nimble ghosts still stand up to the darkest answers. No, I can’t hear one voice pleading. But I do hear gusts coming down from the hills. No, you’re wrong again. The crow perched on the totem is real. Look at how the light lifts off its wings, but I wish I could understand what it is he’s trying to say. I think I heard a name.

What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, Leaving all that here can win us; What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away? Is it a purblind prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye, Who watch us stepping by With doubt and dolorous sigh? Can much pondering so hoodwink you! Is it a purblind prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye? Nay. We well see what we are doing, Though some may not see— Dalliers as they be— England's need are we; Her distress would leave us rueing: Nay. We well see what we are doing, Though some may not see! In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just, And that braggarts must Surely bite the dust, Press we to the field ungrieving, In our heart of hearts believing Victory crowns the just. Hence the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, Leaving all that here can win us; Hence the faith and fire within us Men who march away.

1917 They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young, The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave: But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung, Shall they come with years and honour to the grave? They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain In sight of help denied from day to day: But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain, Are they too strong and wise to put away? Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide— Never while the bars of sunset hold. But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died, Shall they thrust for high employments as of old? Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour? When the storm is ended shall we find How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power By the favour and contrivance of their kind? Even while they soothe us, while they promise large amends, Even while they make a show of fear, Do they call upon their debtors, and take counsel with their friends, To conform and re-establish each career? Their lives cannot repay us—their death could not undo— The shame that they have laid upon our race. But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew, Shall we leave it unabated in its place?

Only this boy moves between the runes of trees on his tricycle when an eagle swoops, releases two arrows from its silver wings, and melts away faster than lightning. Then a loud whistle and a bang like dry thunder. In a blink the boy sees his house roof sink. Feels his ears ripped off. The blast puffs up a fawn smoke bigger than a mountain cloud. The slow begonias rattle their scarlet like confetti. Metal slashes the trees and ricochets. Wires and pipes snap at the roots, quiver. The whirling smoke packed with bricks and cement, chicken feathers and nigella seeds. When the cloud begins to settle on the ground, the boy makes out buckled iron rods. White soot descends and he finds himself dressed like an apprentice baker.

To each orphaned child—so long as you remain close enough to walk to your living kin you will dance, feast, feel community in food. This cannot stand. Eighty acres allotted. To each head of household—so long as you remember your tribal words for village you will recollect that the grasses still grow and the rivers still flow. So long as you teach your children these words they will remember as well. This we cannot allow. One hundred and sixty acres allotted. To each elder unable to till or hunt—so long as your old and injurious habits sing out over the drum or flicker near the fire you cripple our reward. We seek to hasten your end. Eighty acres allotted. To each widowed wife—so long as you can make your mark, your land may be leased. A blessing on your mark when you sign it and walk closer to your favored white sister. Eighty acres allotted. To each full blood—so long as you have an open hand, we shall fill it with a broken ploughshare. One hundred and sixty acres allotted. To each half blood, each quarter strain—so long as you yearn for the broken ploughshare, you will be provided a spade honed to razor in its place. When every acre of your allotment has been leased or sold, you will turn it on yourself. From that date begins our real and permanent progress.

I wanted to go to military school and march, I wanted to grow up and be composed and expert with a rifle, with tactics and fighting, to be safe and courageous among men in barracks and on the battlefield. I wanted to see my arms hairy and corded with muscle at the end of rolled up khaki sleeves. I wanted to flex my feet in boots and look down at the the dust of battles dimming the leather surfaces, the blood slick on the rim of the soles. I wanted the smell of gunpowder in my nostrils, the grime on my face, the washed-out hollow love for my comrades found in the foxholes, the sad understanding, the requiems of late afternoons walking away from the burial site with the widow as she cradled the triangulated flag like a plowblade in her arms.

Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pretend that furniture is enough to protect us against perilous flames. Radiation. Contamination. Toxic breath. Each air-raid drill is sheer terror, but some of the city kids giggle. They don't believe that death is real. They've never touched a bullet, or seen a vulture, or made music by shaking the jawbone of a mule. When I hide under my frail school desk, my heart grows as rough and brittle as the slab of wood that fails to protect me from reality's gloom.