502 War poems

“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said When we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. “He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

1914-1918 The Garden called Gethsemane In Picardy it was, And there the people came to see The English soldiers pass. We used to pass—we used to pass Or halt, as it might be, And ship our masks in case of gas Beyond Gethsemane. The Garden called Gethsemane, It held a pretty lass, But all the time she talked to me I prayed my cup might pass. The officer sat on the chair, The men lay on the grass, And all the time we halted there I prayed my cup might pass. It didn’t pass—it didn’t pass- It didn’t pass from me. I drank it when we met the gas Beyond Gethsemane!

The young man, hardly more than a boy, who fired the shot had looked at him with an air not of anger but of concentration, as if he were surveying a road, or feeding a length of wood into a saw: It had to be done just so. The bullet passed through his upper chest, below the collar bone. The pain was not what he might have feared. Strangely exhilarated he staggered out of the pasture and into a grove of trees. He pressed and pressed the wound, trying to stanch the blood, but he could only press what he could reach, and he could not reach his back, where the bullet had exited. He lay on the earth smelling the leaves and mosses, musty and damp and cool after the blaze of open afternoon. How good the earth smelled, as it had when he was a boy hiding from his father, who was intent of strapping him for doing his chores late one time too many. A cowbird razzed from a rail fence. It isn't mockery, he thought, no malice in it. . . just a noise. Stray bullets nicked the oaks overhead. Leaves and splinters fell. Someone near him groaned. But it was his own voice he heard. His fingers and feet tingled, the roof of his mouth, and the bridge of his nose. . . . He became dry, dry, and thought of Christ, who said,I thirst. His man-smell, the smell of his hair and skin, his sweat, the salt smell of his cock and the little ferny hairs that two women had known left him, and a sharp, almost sweet smell began to rise from his open mouth in the warm shade of the oaks. A streak of sun climbed the rough trunk of a tree, but he did not see it with his open eye.

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place. You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace. You make us shells. You listen with delight, By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed. You can't believe that British troops “retire” When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood. O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

God! How I hate you, you young cheerful men, Whose pious poetry blossoms on your graves As soon as you are in them, nurtured up By the salt of your corruption, and the tears Of mothers, local vicars, college deans, And flanked by prefaces and photographs From all you minor poet friends—the fools— Who paint their sentimental elegies Where sure, no angel treads; and, living, share The dead’s brief immortality Oh Christ! To think that one could spread the ductile wax Of his fluid youth to Oxford’s glowing fires And take her seal so ill! Hark how one chants— “Oh happy to have lived these epic days”— “These epic days”! And he’d been to France, And seen the trenches, glimpsed the huddled dead In the periscope, hung in the rusting wire: Chobed by their sickley fœtor, day and night Blown down his throat: stumbled through ruined hearths, Proved all that muddy brown monotony, Where blood’s the only coloured thing. Perhaps Had seen a man killed, a sentry shot at night, Hunched as he fell, his feet on the firing-step, His neck against the back slope of the trench, And the rest doubled up between, his head Smashed like and egg-shell, and the warm grey brain Spattered all bloody on the parados: Had flashed a torch on his face, and known his friend, Shot, breathing hardly, in ten minutes—gone! Yet still God’s in His heaven, all is right In the best possible of worlds. The woe, Even His scaled eyes must see, is partial, only A seeming woe, we cannot understand. God loves us, God looks down on this out strife And smiles in pity, blows a pipe at times And calls some warriors home. We do not die, God would not let us, He is too “intense,” Too “passionate,” a whole day sorrows He Because a grass-blade dies. How rare life is! On earth, the love and fellowship of men, Men sternly banded: banded for what end? Banded to maim and kill their fellow men— For even Huns are men. In heaven above A genial umpire, a good judge of sport, Won’t let us hurt each other! Let’s rejoice God keeps us faithful, pens us still in fold. Ah, what a faith is ours (almost, it seems, Large as a mustard-seed)—we trust and trust, Nothing can shake us! Ah, how good God is To suffer us to be born just now, when youth That else would rust, can slake his blade in gore, Where very God Himself does seem to walk The bloody fields of Flanders He so loves!

Sirs, when you are in your last extremity, When your admirals are drowning in the grass-green sea, When your generals are preparing the total catastrophe— I just want you to know how you can not count on me. I have ridden to hounds through my ancestral halls, I have picked the eternal crocus on the ultimate hill, I have fallen through the window of the highest room, But don’

Before the war leaned in and blew out the candles, there were many long days where lovers called themselves lovers and a house was a dream but also four walls, a roof. A father called to his daughter to see the monarch butterflies, pausing in their migration to fan the goldenrod, a tiger in each coy disclosure. A young man reached for a blackberry and found draped on a branch a green snake the color of matcha. A snake the color of matcha sighed in the sun. People drove in cars. There were jobs and someone had to work every morning. A man quit his job but it was no tragedy. He didn’t like the work. Another man slid in and found it comfortable enough, and just as easily slid in beside the man’s wife and into the everyday rhythms of his life and that was no tragedy either. After rains, a ring of mushrooms would delicately crack the earth. Spanish moss harbored red mites. The sky wasn’t interesting. No one looked up.

i. He could have taken you prisoner, of course when our two tribes were at war over whitefish and beaver territory and the Anishinaabeg chased your Indian ancestors from the woodlands he now brings you home to. Or your Dakota relatives might have waged a war party on their swift plains’ ponies to avenge your taking and bring you back from those uncivilized they named in disgust the rabbit-chokers. But those histories of dog-eaters and Chippewa crows are just a backdrop now for other stories told together by descendants of smallpox survivors and French fur traders, clan members of Wolf and of Water Spirit. And now you gather, trackers and scouts in new bloodless legal battles, still watch for mark and sign— for the flight of waterbirds. ii. Old histories that name us enemies don’t own us; nor do our politics grown so pow-wow liberal you seldom point out the follies of White Earth tribal leaders. (Except of course for the time our elected chair mistakenly and under the influence of civilization drove his pickup down the railroad tracks and made the tri-state ten o’clock news.) And Sundays behind the Tribune he seldom even mentions the rabid casino bucks or gets out his calculator and with lodge-pole eyebrows methodically measures beaded distances, results of territorial lines drawn in your homeland. And even though I have seen him sniff, glance over he really almost never checks the meat in your pot, nor reconnoiters the place of your rendezvous just to be sure.

When the soldiers came in their dirty blue shirts I was kneeling in the garden in the rain. That year only a few ramblers were left and the trellis had collapsed from the wind. Still I was glad for the water and darkness that clotted the air; the days had seemed sour to me in spite of the glory of the vegetables wandering into fall, the fat swollen apples and the wild roses creeping under the lilac. And there, as the men approached, I stood up near the two willow saplings sprouted from posts but driven in, the larger one, by the neighbor boy when he entered service, the smaller one when he returned home. I could see the street from where I stood, as though wrapped in gauze, heavy with the nests of caterpillars. (Next week a man with rags tied to sticks would dip them in kerosene and burn the worms that would then drop squirming onto his arms, his hair, the street.) And then I thought I was lying at the bottom of a pond edged with grayish leaves and looking up to the surface. I saw leaves, raindrops shattering the sky like splinters of glass drifting toward my body; noises seemed echoes as I continued to distance myself from what had happened. After that a disbelief, perhaps I had had a stroke, hit my head, or fallen asleep and woke to flies banging against my face. I saw edges of myself being flattened by rain, could smell the earth too and thought of the years of rot that made the smell, the rot of my father and his father and all those who had gone before and how we eat the root of the earth and then turn into rot ourselves just as pieces of dirt were grinding away between my teeth and tongue, my bit of gristle being stirred into earth’s stew. I began to raise my head and noticed for the first time the bunting, red, white, and blue, hung out for the parade.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.