502 War poems

The Israeli Navy, sailing to the end of the world, stocked with grain and books black with God’s verse, turned back, rather than sail on the Sabbath. Six days, was the consensus, was enough for anyone. So the world, it was concluded, was three days wide in each direction, allowing three days back. And Saturdays were given over to keeping close, while Sundays the Navy, all decked out in white and many-colored skullcaps, would sail furiously, trying to go off the deep end. Yo-ho-ho, would say the sailors, for six days. While on the shore their women moaned. For years, their boats were slow, and all show. And they turned into families on the only land they knew.

I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling. Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map pinned with targets, where I’m raging even now. It works both ways. Clear the forests to see your enemies and your enemies see you clearly. Like all effective incendiaries, I won’t only bloom where I’m planted.

There they go marching all in step so gay! Smooth-cheeked and golden, food for shells and guns. Blithely they go as to a wedding day, The mothers' sons. The drab street stares to see them row on row On the high tram-tops, singing like the lark. Too careless-gay for courage, singing they go Into the dark. With tin whistles, mouth-organs, any noise, They pipe the way to glory and the grave; Foolish and young, the gay and golden boys Love cannot save. High heart! High courage! The poor girls they kissed Run with them : they shall kiss no more, alas! Out of the mist they stepped-into the mist Singing they pass.

In standing position with arms to the side, jump while spreading the legs and lift arms above the head. Jump back into standing position and up again, spreading the legs and lifting the arms above the head. Repeat When a M16 landmine is triggered, it will spring into the air and explode with a capacity to level everything in a 150 metre radius. Deadly shrapnel spreading a further 350 metres. Metal casings from an unexploded bomb can fetch 25,000 Vietnamese dong or $1 for a poor family in Vietnam. Men comb the forests and beaches of Quang Tri looking for the metal that will feed their family, risking their lives. Children working in the fields think it’s a toy they’ve found. Nguyen was hoeing a small piece of land his parents gave him when an unexploded U.S. military bomb was triggered and blew off both his hands.

I uproot & save mental venture I split the dream of the slow & neutral Persist & breathe My little flask Pointy wisp Pubescent valve Join the game I smoke & praise you Hew & raze you Jungle kill Bulldoze your sierra Fire to ash I wait & wait And you where are you Fragrant lantana Aim your voice In calm plains In silence wild Erasing the thirst The weightless altar insults the blood Awake diagonals Rot & Stand Go & go Flower gaining Plant your will!

Ten years on, I came searching for war signs of the past expecting remnants — magazine debris, unexploded shells, shrapnel that mark bomb wounds. I came looking for ghosts — people past, skeletons charred, abandoned brick-wood-cement that once housed them. I could only find whispers — whispers among the clamour of a small town outpost in full throttle — everyday chores sketching outward signs of normality and life. In that bustle I spot war-lines of a decade ago, though the storylines are kept buried, wrapped in old newsprint. There is order amid uneasiness — the muezzin’s cry, the monk’s chant — baritones merging in their separateness. At the bus station black coughs of exhaust smoke-screens everything. The roads meet and after the crossroad ritual diverge, skating along the undotted lines of control. A porous garland with cracked beads adorns Tiger Hill. Beyond the mountains are dark memories, and beyond them no one knows, and beyond them no one wants to know. Even the flight of birds that wing over their crests don’t know which feathers to down. Chameleon-like they fly, tracing perfect parabolas. I look up and calculate their exact arc and find instead,                                     a flawed theorem.

was it so I could never say across a courtroom that man, the one standing there was it so you could walk among us again after as if you had shed the body that did those things was it because you could not bear my pupils so huge they would have swallowed you my whites like flayed kneecaps when you pressed down to singe them back into my skull they were softer than you expected you had thought them diamond hard weapons turned on you was it so you could imagine a time when you would be human again among humans that you had to leave some of us alive?

Pyke, from his Massachusetts madhouse, envisioned it as a divine craft, an Ark impervious to torpedoes. ICE is with us, ICE will win this war, he wrote Mountbatten. With a draft of one hundred and fifty feet, two million tons displacement, it could carry one hundred twin-engine planes, three thousand men, and required no steel to assemble, only water and pulp. Onboard, the men lived in cork-paneled cabins, skated down corridors to deliver urgent messages. A miracle ship, organically arisen from the element it moved in, indistinguishable from its medium, formed by Nature’s design, not the Royal Navy’s. Even her weaponry resembled God’s own: “brine guns” which would encase the enemy in ice like straw in glass, or block his harbor will a flotilla of icebergs. Churchill himself approved draining White Bay for its construction and ordered all cork immediately diverted to Canada, where a prototype built by conscientious objectors lasted through the summer disguised as a boathouse. By then Allies had landed in France, and the project was scrapped— Mountbatten threatened to lock him up again, paying no attention to a new plan for smuggling assassins into Berlin in boxes marked “Officers Only” on the grounds that the Germans were an obedient race. Love and duty stir men to action, but war makes us dream: before his suicide he shaved his beard, head. Outside, wet snow fell hard against the city, as though to clear it for another world.

The noise throws down twin shadows, hunting shadows on a black joy ride. They roar up the silver vein of the river and out over the stony peaks, which have been shrunken to a luminous green musculature on the screens. Who are the pilots, too high to see the splayed hearts of deer tracks under the apple trees, or smell the cider in the fallen fruit? Who are the vandals that ransack the wilderness of clouds? Below them, a thin froth of waterfall spills from a rock face. They see its sudden wreckage, its yielding gouts, and the wind tear into the papery leaves of the poplars, roughing them up so the undersides show— a glimpse of paleness like a glimpse of underwear. The pilots are young men, and still immortal. Already in the cold quadrants of their hearts they imagine the whole world flowering beneath them. It feels like love, like being with a woman who flowers beneath them, so that they wonder how it would feel to go on riding the young green world that way, to a climax of spectral light.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie, In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.