502 War poems

A sycamore on either side In whose lovely leafage cried Hushingly the little winds — Thus was Mary’s shrine descried. “Sixteen Hundred and Twenty-Four” Legended above the door, “Pray, sweet gracious Lady, pray For our souls,”—and nothing more. Builded of rude gray stones and these Scarred and marred from base to frieze With the shrapnel’s pounces—ah, Fair she braved War’s gaunt disease: Fair she pondered on the strange Embitterments of latter change, Looking fair towards Festubert, Cloven roof and tortured grange. Work of carving too there was, (Once had been her reredos), In this cool and peaceful cell That the hoarse guns blared across. Twisted oaken pillars graced With oaken amaranths interlaced In oaken garlandry, had borne Her holy niche—and now laid waste. Mary, pray for us? O pray! In thy dwelling by this way What poor folks have knelt to thee! We are no less poor than they.

Toplight hammered down by shadowless noon, A palindrome of midnight, retrograde From last month’s solstice in smoke and flame, In molten glares from chrome or glass. I feel Fever from the cars I pass, delirium Trembling out from the radiators. The dog-day romance seems to be physical, As young free lances come into their own, Sunbrowned, imperial in few clothes, Heat-struck adulthood a subject to youth And fitful as traffic, the mind pure jumble But for that secret overriding voice Advising and persuading at each crossroads; The struggle toward freedom to forge a day. Smoke; flame; oiled, gray-brown air. Jackhammers and first gear on the avenues; Stuntmen driving taxicabs; patient, blue, Hippo aggressiveness of a bus, nudging Aside the sedans. And the peculiar Fascination of a row of workshops— The dark interiors with skylight sunstripes; A figure walking in slow motion among Pistons; rough justice of a die cutter; A helmeted diver, wielding acetylene, Crouched over some work of sunken treasure That sparkles gold at a probe from his torch . . . . Seismic shocks interrupt this dream—a stampede Of transports flat out to make the light, Mack truck, Diamond Reo, a nameless tanker, IT International, a Seatrain destined For the Port Authority docks—one more Corrugated block to pile on the rest, Red, green, gray, and blue, waiting for a ship In the Grancolombiana line . . . . The seagoing city radiates invisibly Over the world, a documentary sublime. Lunch hour, even the foods are fast, potluck In the melting pot: the Italian girl With a carton of chicken; Puerto Rican folding A pizza; the black woman with an egg roll; A crop-headed secretary in round, Metal spectacles eats plain yogurt (she’s Already mantis thin) and devours glamour Mags . . . . Our crowd scene, a moving fresco: But is it really there? The adversary Today is named Random. How capture all this Without being taken captive in turn, Install it as something more than backdrop, As a necessity, not a sundry? Suppose just an awareness of the way Living details might be felt as vision Is vision, full, all there ever was—this Instant palindromic noon, the joined hands Of the clock, end and beginning . . . . Surely The first to consider imagining stars Constellations had already done as much, Just by making some brilliant connections; Mind crowned itself in a round of leaps from point To point across the empty stage of night . . . . * * * * * Now as a pigeon banks, descends, hovers, And drops on asphalt with back-thrust wings, Comes a desire to be lifted in the balance, Rise to some highest point and then be met By a fierce new light haloing lashes shatter Into spears of aurora, naked eye become Prismatic at last and given to see in kind All the transformed inhabitants forever go About their errands, on a new scale: the rainbow Is the emblem for this moment filtering through The body’s meshwork nerves, and a heartbeat impulse All around puts troops of feet in step with music, Persistent, availing, that disregards the frayed Years, vagaries, downfall among trash, accident, Loss; or because it knows these rushes upward On something like heartbreak into the only sky, Air aspirant with fractioned voices, feverfew Of the sensed illusion, higher ground, progressions Sounded in the spheres—so each step takes them further, Sceptered, into daytime, saluting the outcome. There is a fire that surpasses the known burning, Its phoenix center a couple that must be there, Blast furnace, dynamo, engendering a city, Phosphor spines that bend and meet to weld, to fuse As a divining rod—sluicings, spillway, braid, Chorded basses that set myriad threads afire, Newborn limbs and reach of the proven tendon now Let go into empowered brilliance, rayed showers, The garden regained. In this light the place appears: Hands that rise or fall, muted gestures of welcome And good-bye, face that turns and comes forward to claim A smile latent in the afternoon air, vague crowds Falling down streets without character toward An offered covenant—love that gives them each a name.

If, in an odd angle of the hutment, A puppy laps the water from a can Of flowers, and the drunk sergeant shaving Whistles O Paradiso!—shall I say that man Is not as men have said: a wolf to man? The other murderers troop in yawning; Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one Lies counting missions, lies there sweating Till even his heart beats: One; One; One. O murderers!... Still, this is how it’s done: This is a war.... But since these play, before they die, Like puppies with their puppy; since, a man, I did as these have done, but did not die— I will content the people as I can And give up these to them: Behold the man! I have suffered, in a dream, because of him, Many things; for this last saviour, man, I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying? Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can: I find no fault in this just man.

The men that worked for England They have their graves at home: And birds and bees of England About the cross can roam. But they that fought for England, Following a falling star, Alas, alas for England They have their graves afar. And they that rule in England, In stately conclave met, Alas, alas for England They have no graves as yet.

One writes to ask me if I’ve read Of “the Jutland battle,” of “the great advance Made by the Russians,” chiding—“History Is being made these days, these are the things That are worth while.” These! Not to one who’s lain In Heaven before God’s throne with eyes abased, Worshipping Him, in many forms of Good, That sate thereon; turning this patchwork world Wholly to glorify Him, point His plan Toward some supreme perfection, dimly visioned By loving faith: not these to him, when, stressed By some soul-dizzying woe beyond his trust, He lifts his startled face, and finds the Throne Empty, turns away, too drunk with Truth To mind his shame, or feel the loss of God.

When I was a boy, he says, the sky began burning, & someone ran knocking on our door one night. The house became birds in the eaves too low for a boy's ears. I heard a girl talking, but they weren't words. I knew one good thing: a girl was somewhere in our house, speaking slow as a sailor's parrot. I glimpsed Alice in Wonderland. Her voice smelled like an orange, though I'd never peeled an orange. I knocked on the walls, in a circle. The voice was almost America. My ears plucked a word out of the air. She said, Friend. I eased open the door hidden behind overcoats in a closet. The young woman was smiling at me. She was teaching herself a language to take her far, far away, & she taught me a word each day to keep secret. But one night I woke to other voices in the house. A commotion downstairs & a pleading. There are promises made at night that turn into stones at daybreak. From my window, I saw the stars burning in the river brighter than a big celebration. I waited for her return, with my hands over my mouth. I can't say her name, because it was dangerous in our house so close to the water. Was she a boy's make-believe friend or a beehive breathing inside the walls? Years later my aunts said two German soldiers shot the girl one night beside the Vistula. This is how I learned your language. It was long ago. It was springtime.

I enter the void, it has the shape of a viola: Israel, Jenin, West Bank, Nablus—a rubble boy shifts his scapula as if it was his continent, underground Gazaground, I want to say—his only bone, the rubble boy is a girl, I think, her hair tossed, knotted and torn under the green shank of fibers, tubes and shells. She digs for her rubble father, I say rubble because it is indistinguishable from ice, fire, dust, clay, flesh, tears, concrete, bread, lungs, pubis, god, say rubble, say water— the rubble girl digs for her rubble mother, occupation—disinheritance—once again, I had written this somewhere, in a workshop, I think, yes, it was an afternoon of dark poets with leaves, coffee and music in the liquor light room. A rock, perhaps it's a rock, juts out, two rocks embrace each other, the shapes come to me easily, an old poetic reflex—memoria, a nation underground, that is it, the nation under-ground, that is why the rocks cover it. I forget to mention the blasts, so many things flying, light, existence, the house in tins, a mother in rags. It is too cold to expose her tiny legs, the fish-shaped back—you must take these notes for me. Before you go. See this undulate extend beyond the pools of blood. I ride the night, past the Yukon, past South Laredo, past Odessa, past the Ukraine, old Jaffa, Haifa and Istanbul, across clouds, hesitant and porous, listen— they are porous so we can glide into them, this underbelly, this underground: wound-mothers and sobbing fathers, they leave, in their ribboned flesh, shores lisp against nothingness, open—toward you, they dissolve again into my shoes— Hear the dust gong: gendarme passports, cloned maize men in C-130's, with tears bubbling on their hands, pebbles en route—we are all en route to the rubblelands. I want to chant a bliss mantra— Prajnaparamita can you hear me? I want to call for the dragon-slayer omchild. I am on my knees again. On the West Bank count the waves of skull debris—a Hebrew letter for "love" refuses me, an Arabic letter for "boundary" acknowledges me. Sit on an embankment, a dust fleece, there is a tidal wave ahead of me. It will never reach me. I live underground, under the Dead Sea, under the benevolent rocks and forearms and mortar shells and slender naked red green torsos, black, so much black. En route: this could be a train, listen: it derails into a cloud.

I saw the garden where my aunt had died And her two children and a woman from next door; It was like a burst pod filled with clay. A mile away in the night I had heard the bombs Sing and then burst themselves between cramped houses With bright soft flashes and sounds like banging doors; The last of them crushed the four bodies into the ground, Scattered the shelter, and blasted my uncle’s corpse Over the housetop and into the street beyond. Now the garden lay stripped and stale; the iron shelter Spread out its separate petals around a smooth clay saucer. Small, and so tidy it seemed nobody had ever been there. When I saw it, the house was blown clean by blast and care. Relations had already torn out the new fireplaces; My cousin’s pencils lasted me several years. And in his office notepad that was given me I found solemn drawings in crayon of blondes without dresses. In his lifetime I had not known him well. These were the things I noticed at ten years of age: Those, and the four hearses outside our house, The chocolate cakes, and my classmates’ half-shocked envy. But my grandfather went home from the mortuary And for five years tried to share the noises in his skull, Then he walked out and lay under a furze-bush to die. When my father came back from identifying the daughter He asked us to remind him of her mouth. We tried. He said ‘I think it was the one’. These were marginal people I had met only rarely And the end of the whole household meant that no grief was seen; Never have people seemed so absent from their own deaths. This bloody episode of four whom I could understand better dead Gave me something I needed to keep a long story moving; I had no pain of it; can find no scar even now. But had my belief in the fiction not been thus buoyed up I might, in the sigh and strike of the next night’s bombs Have realized a little what they meant, and for the first time been afraid.

These, in the days when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and the earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.

1914-18 “equality of sacrifice” A. “I was a Have.”   B. “I was a ‘have-not.’” (Together).“What hast thou given which I gave not?” a servant We were together since the War began. He was my servant—and the better man. a son My son was killed while laughing at some jest.    I would I knew What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few. an only son I have slain none except my Mother.    She (Blessing her slayer) died of grief for me. ex-clerk Pity not!    The Army gave Freedom to a timid slave: In which Freedom did he find Strength of body, will, and mind: By which strength he came to prove Mirth, Companionship, and Love: For which Love to Death he went: In which Death he lies content. the wonder Body and Spirit I surrendered whole To harsh Instructors—and received a soul . . . If mortal man could change me through and through From all I was—what may The God not do? hindu sepoy in france This man in his own country prayed we know not to what Powers. We pray Them to reward him for his bravery in ours. the coward I could not look on Death, which being known, Men led me to him, blindfold and alone. shock My name, my speech, my self I had forgot. My wife and children came—I knew them not. I died.    My Mother followed.    At her call And on her bosom I remembered all. a grave near cairo Gods of the Nile, should this stout fellow here Get out—get out!    He knows not shame nor fear. pelicans in the wilderness