502 War poems

This is the song of the mud, The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin; The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys; The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the road beds; The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under the hoofs of the horses; The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone. This is the song of the mud, the uniform of the poilu. His coat is of mud, his great dragging flapping coat, that is too big for him and too heavy; His coat that once was blue and now is grey and stiff with the mud that cakes to it. This is the mud that clothes him. His trousers and boots are of mud, And his skin is of mud; And there is mud in his beard. His head is crowned with a helmet of mud. He wears it well. He wears it as a king wears the ermine that bores him. He has set a new style in clothing; He has introduced the chic of mud. This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle. The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome, The slimy inveterate nuisance, That fills the trenches, That mixes in with the food of the soldiers, That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts, That spreads itself over the guns, That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous lips, That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells; And slowly, softly, easily, Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage; Soaks up the power of armies; Soaks up the battle. Just soaks it up and thus stops it. This is the hymn of mud-the obscene, the filthy, the putrid, The vast liquid grave of our armies. It has drowned our men. Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead. Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly disappearing. Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men; Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men. Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it, Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence. Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down, And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud. Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them! Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly. There is not a trace of them. There is no mark where they went down. The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them. This is the song of the mud, The beautiful glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin; The mysterious gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys. Mud, the disguise of the war zone; Mud, the mantle of battles; Mud, the smooth fluid grave of our soldiers: This is the song of the mud.

This is the field where the battle did not happen, where the unknown soldier did not die. This is the field where grass joined hands, where no monument stands, and the only heroic thing is the sky. Birds fly here without any sound, unfolding their wings across the open. No people killed—or were killed—on this ground hallowed by neglect and an air so tame that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

Lubbock, Texas Between 1985-1987, he writes sincerely, gratefully to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Red Cross Central Tracing Agency, Thai National Police, U.S. Department of State, and more, to no real end, though each letter surpasses the last. First he writes them in long hand, in Vietnamese, then I think someone helps revise, translate, and type: Don’t say the boat was stopped or encircled, say the boat was surrounded by the Thai pirates; it’s true they took away with them eight girls in our boat, but abducted captures the situation better; say…— “The Reading Room will be closing in 15 minutes.” I sit and stare at the rust print left by a paperclip coiling into the dead end of a labyrinth. I’m reading the letters of Mr. Nguyen Van The concerning the disappearance of his granddaughter, Dinh Thuy Trang, when she escaped by boat… In the blue of his sentences a boat leaves Vietnam, on October 24, 1985, ventures into the South China Sea, and drifts dangerously along the coast of Thailand. I can just make out the boat, a small open “v”, drawing its wake pattern, on the sea, in the letters. Around 9 A.M. of 26 October, the boat was surrounded by 5 fishing boats belonging to the Thai fishermen. I recoil at the actions his apt verbs dramatize— invaded, searched, ransacked, pried, looked, seized: I see teeth flashing inside mouths like knives. No trace of Thuy. She’s gone…

The last time I saw Paul Castle it was printed in gold on the wall above the showers in the boys’ locker room, next to the school record for the mile. I don’t recall his time, but the year was 1968 and I can look across the infield of memory to see him on the track, legs flashing, body bending slightly beyond the pack of runners at his back. He couldn’t spare a word for me, two years younger, junior varsity, and hardly worth the waste of breath. He owned the hallways, a cool blonde at his side, and aimed his interests further down the line than we could guess. Now, reading the name again, I see us standing in the showers, naked kids beneath his larger, comprehensive force—the ones who trail obscurely, in the wake of the swift, like my shadow on this gleaming wall.

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun, Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one, Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear, Men jostle and climb to, meet the bristling fire. Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, They leave their trenches, going over the top, While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists, And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists, Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

Themiscyra, 72 BC While Lucullus raided cherry orchards, he left us to besiege, grudgingly, this outlander fortress, named for an Amazon queen, while thinking of food and home. Not one of us has seen a single horse-borne warrior woman. Meanwhile, we dug a tomb. We intended it as the tunnel through which we’d claim the fort. We shored up the sifting roof and dug by lamps that shed more shadows than light. At last we formed up underground to attack with sword and fire, but the enemy tossed in hives, and in a cloud of stinging bees our torches jerked and swung or fell so we could hardly tell where to strike, or what, for next our enemy sent weasels in, and foxes, which seemed to be done in jest until we felt their teeth and heard, more than saw, the larger beasts. A wolf  began my death. I lay in men’s and weasels’ blood and heard the body that dropped at my side ask,What barbarian thought to make of thoughtless creatures weapons of war?

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon. Milkflower petals on the street like pieces of a girl’s dress. May your days be merry and bright... He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips. Open, he says. She opens. Outside, a soldier spits out his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones fallen from the sky.May all

What in our lives is burnt In the fire of this? The heart's dear granary? The much we shall miss? Three lives hath one life— Iron, honey, gold. The gold, the honey gone— Left is the hard and cold. Iron are our lives Molten right through our youth. A burnt space through ripe fields, A fair mouth's broken tooth.

God said, “Men have forgotten Me: The souls that sleep shall wake again, And blinded eyes must learn to see.” So since redemption comes through pain He smote the earth with chastening rod, And brought destruction's lurid reign; But where His desolation trod The people in their agony Despairing cried, “There is no God.”

Whose woods these are I think I know ... The landings had gone wrong; white silk, like shrouds, covered the woods. The trees had trapped the flimsy fabric in their web—everywhere the harnessed bodies hung—helpless, treading air like water. We thought to float down easily—a simple thing like coming home: feet first, a welcome from the waiting fields, a gentle fall in clover. We hadn’t counted on this wilderness, the gusts of wind that took us over; we were surprised by the tenacity of branching wood, its reach, and how impenetrable the place we left, and thought we knew, could be. Sometimes now, as we sway, unwilling pendulums that mark the time, we still can dream someone will come and cut us down. There is nothing here but words, the calls we try the dark with—hoping for a human ear, response, a rescue party. But all we hear is other voices like our own, other bodies tangled in the lines, the repetition of a cry from every tree: I can’t help you, help me.