502 War poems

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds, The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be: “All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters. “That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening.... “Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men, And rest eternal sorely need).” So down we lay again. “I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,” Said one, “than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!” And many a skeleton shook his head. “Instead of preaching forty year,” My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.” Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

We are circling, glad of the battle: we joy in the smell of the smoke. Fight on in the hell of the trenches: we publish your names with a croak! Ye will lie in dim heaps when the sunset blows cold on the reddening sand; Yet fight, for the dead will have wages—a death-clutch of dust in the hand. Ye have given us banquet, O kings, and still do we clamor for more: Vast, vast is our hunger, as vast as the sea-hunger gnawing the shore. ’Tis well ye are swift with your signals— the blaze of the banners, the blare Of the bugles, the boom of battalions, the cannon-breath hot on the air. It is for our hunger ye hurry, it is for our feast ye are met: Be sure we will never forget you, O servants that never forget! For we are the Spirits of Battle, the peerage of greed we defend: Our lineage rose from the Night, and we go without fellow or friend. We were ere our servant Sesostris spread over the Asian lands The smoke of the blood of the peoples, and scattered their bones to the sands. We circled in revel for ages above the Assyrian stream, While Babylon builded her beauty, and faded to dust and to dream. We scattered our laughter on nations— and Troy was a word and a waste, The glory of Carthage was ruined, the grandeur of Rome was effaced! And we blazoned the name of Timour, as he harried his herd of kings, And the host of his hordes wound on, a dragon with undulant rings. And we slid down the wind upon France, when the steps of the earthquake passed, When the Bastile bloomed into flame, and the heavens went by on the blast. We hung over Austerlitz, cheering the armies with jubilant cries: We scented three kings at the carnage, and croaked our applause from the skies. O kings, ye have catered to vultures— have chosen to feed us, forsooth, The joy of the world and her glory, the hope of the world and her youth. O kings, ye are diligent lackeys: we laurel your names with our praise, For ye are the staff of our comfort, for ye are the strength of our days. Then spur on the host in the trenches to give up the sky at a stroke: We tell all the winds of their glory: we publish their fame with a croak!

I Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. “Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!” he said. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. II “Forward, the Light Brigade!” Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew Someone had blundered. Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred. III Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell Rode the six hundred. IV Flashed all their sabres bare, Flashed as they turned in air Sabring the gunners there, Charging an army, while All the world wondered. Plunged in the battery-smoke Right through the line they broke; Cossack and Russian Reeled from the sabre stroke Shattered and sundered. Then they rode back, but not Not the six hundred. V Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon behind them Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, While horse and hero fell. They that had fought so well Came through the jaws of Death, Back from the mouth of hell, All that was left of them, Left of six hundred. VI When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered. Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred!

Let’s get this straight: Charles Graner is not America. America would never hold a knife to his wife’s throat, then say when she woke that he was considering killing her. And America’s wife in turn would never call her husband “my own Hannibal Lecter.” Am I right, or what? Charles Graner may be Hannibal Lecter, but he is not America. America is not that kind of husband. Nor would America email his adolescent children photos of himself torturing naked Iraqi prisoners and say “look what Daddy gets to do!” Am I right? America is not that kind of father. America would never torture naked Iraqi prisoners. Let’s be absolutely clear about all of this. And America’s ex-lover and co-defendant would never whisper to the sketch artist at America’s trial: “You forgot the horns.” Charles Graner may or may not have horns, but America is horn-free. America does not torture prisoners. America may render them, fully clothed, to Egypt or Syria, for further interrogation, or to men like Charles Graner, but America is not, ipso facto, Egypt or Syria, and Charles Graner is not now nor has he ever been America. And don’t talk to me about Guantanamo. Please! Let’s get this straight. You and I know who America is. We know what America does and doesn’t do, because we (not Charles Graner!) are America. Am I right? Is this all clear? Tell me—am I right, or what?

Minnesota, May 1945 DMZ, September 1967 1 In Tokyo our gallant boys dance rock-and-roll, squint eyes wary at standing easy. They leer and reel on a springboard tip and then jackknife toward the electronic noise . . . And Charley, when Time Inc. said he said the President had his head wedged about Vietnam burning for honor or—who knows? the Action he had said— married the Marines. He showered for vows on those who took his word who taught him shoot it out and shout “Yes Sir Yes Sir!” and sent him out like napalm obedient to any itchy finger. I hope the fields of Minnesota gave perspective when he moved out as to the starting line on the command,survive,survive. . . . our juiced doughboys feel their girls. 2 What did I tell you when we met last and it “after the leeches and the food” on a break in the rain was already up with you, Charley? Mouthing the big cigar like a gangster at the wheel . . . cigarette between thumb and finger the way we all even in junior high learned not to your men watching in wonder him tasting the strange (turned officer so young) foreign taste that smoke:     and all was dark except what sparks he scattered there, stubbing it out What could we do for you you hugging your knees who taught you to raise your voice? 3 No more the wide Mankato pearled with ice under blue January sky your arm around the shoulder of the friend who ran faster no more the long hours pad in hand composing reasons for your belief a belief in fathers has no reason no more the simple passion of going first your hatless straightness, the struggle, the deep worry, the dark Africa of being alive in a country run by chiefs without tribes no more of all that, only your brief beauty in many hearts in a time when fathers bury their sons, and you surrounded, cut down in a war you were fated never to see, blinded by love for all men.

Dove-twirl in the tall grass. End-of-summer glaze next door On the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree. Work sounds: truck back-up beep, wood tin-hammer, cicada, fire horn. History handles our past like spoiled fruit. Mid-morning, late-century light calicoed under the peach trees. Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here. The poem is a code with no message: The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath, Absolute, incommunicado, unhoused and peregrine. The gill net of history will pluck us soon enough From the cold waters of self-contentment we drift in One by one into its suffocating light and air. Structure becomes an element of belief, syntax And grammar a catechist, Their words what the beads say, words thumbed to our discontent.

A woman ladder leans with her two-year-old boy in her arms. Her arms & legs & hands & feet are thin as crayons. The man ladder is holding his glass of bourbon, he is coming out of the child’s drawing in his old open pajamas— he’s in the war. The sky is blackest crayon-canyon. When does he leave again? When he leaves, I leave.          I like that river the sky.

1914-18 ("The Honours of War" —A Diversity of Creatures) These were our children who died for our lands: they were dear in our sight. We have only the memory left of their home-treasured sayings and laughter. The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not another’s hereafter. Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it.    That is our right. But who shall return us the children? At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences, And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts that they bared for us, The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time prepared for us— Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences. They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us, Those hours which we had not made good when the Judgment o’ercame us. They believed us and perished for it.    Our statecraft, our learning Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour— Nor since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her. Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them. The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption: Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption, Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marveling, closed on them. That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven— By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled in the wires— To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes— to be cindered by fires— To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation From crater to crater.    For that we shall take expiation. But who shall return us our children?

This synod is convinced that the forces of the Allies are being used of God to vindicate the rights of the weak and to maintain the moral order of the world. Anglican Synod, Melbourne, 1916. Bit weird at first, That starey look in the eyes, The hair down past his shoulders, But after a go with the ship’s barber, A sea-water shower and the old slouch hat Across his ears, he started to look the part. Took him a while to get the way A bayonet fits the old Lee-Enfield, But going in on the boats He looked calmer than any of us, Just gazing in over the swell Where the cliffs looked black against the sky. When we hit he fairly raced in through the waves, Then up the beach, swerving like a full-back at the end When the Turks’d really got on to us. Time we all caught up, He was off like a flash, up the cliffs, After his first machine gun. He’d done for three Turks when we got there, The fourth was a gibbering mess. Seeing him wave that blood-red bayonet, I reckoned we were glad To have him on the side.

Watch — Vasenka citizens do not know they are evidence of happiness in a time of war, each is a ripped-out document of laughter. God, deaf  have something to tell that not even they can hear — you will find me, God, like a dumb pigeon’s beak I am pecking every way at astonishment. If you climb a roof in the Central Square of a bombarded city, you will see my people and me — one neighbor thieves a cigarette another gives a dog a pint of sunlit beer.