502 War poems

As I went up by Ovillers In mud and water cold to the knee, There went three jeering, fleering spectres, That walked abreast and talked of me. The first said, ‘Here’s a right brave soldier That walks the dark unfearingly; Soon he’ll come back on a fine stretcher, And laughing for a nice Blighty.’ The second, ‘Read his face, old comrade, No kind of lucky chance I see; One day he’ll freeze in mud to the marrow, Then look his last on Picardie.’ Though bitter the word of these first twain Curses the third spat venomously; ‘He’ll stay untouched till the war’s last dawning Then live one hour of agony.’ Liars the first two were. Behold me At sloping arms by one – two – three; Waiting the time I shall discover Whether the third spake verity.

The comet taught us how to watch the war. The comet contended that fire is romantic and recommended we each behold it alone, envisioning out there somewhere our next lover, craning up at this same sky. Was the comet simply endeavoring to keep us divided, I asked it, and the comet did not reply. Then we discovered the men who wanted us dead were convening at night on the site where their hero had been unceremoniously interred. And so we exhumed the guy, burned him up, and fed his ash to the rapids, to be churned into marlstone and mud-rich air. Good thinking. Now he’s everywhere.

(On the Signing of the Armistice, 11 Nov. 1918) I There had been years of Passion—scorching, cold, And much Despair, and Anger heaving high, Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold, Among the young, among the weak and old, And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?” II Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness, Philosophies that sages long had taught, And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought, And “Hell!” and “Shell!” were yapped at Lovingkindness. III The feeble folk at home had grown full-used To 'dug-outs', 'snipers', 'Huns', from the war-adept In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused; To day-dreamt men in millions, when they mused— To nightmare-men in millions when they slept. IV Waking to wish existence timeless, null, Sirius they watched above where armies fell; He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well. V So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly Were dead and damned, there sounded 'War is done!' One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly, 'Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly, And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?' VI Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped, As they had raised it through the four years’ dance Of Death in the now familiar flats of France; And murmured, 'Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?' VII Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not, The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song. One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, 'What? Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?' VIII Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray, No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn, No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray; Worn horses mused: 'We are not whipped to-day;' No weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn. IX Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency; There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky; Some could, some could not, shake off misery: The Sinister Spirit sneered: 'It had to be!' And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, 'Why?'

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? — Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,— The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

When History turns soldiers into battles, you turn them into grass. Bashō, Sweet, is it honorable? But for these men who died with grunts and clangs in their ears, for their horses with snapped legs, I haven’t got the art to make them into anything. I fold the grass in the shape of a man, very literal, very primitive and leave it on the field and say, “Forgive me valorous men for my ineptitude.” Just then, the little man falls down in the wind and—huh!—there is art. Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .

My copy of The Fireside Book of Verse is as the seller promised—the stapled spine, the paper aged to Army tan—no worse for wear, given the cost of its design, six cents to make and printed on a press once used for magazines and pulp. This book was never meant to last a war much less three quarters of a century. I look for evidence of all the men who scanned these lines, crouched down in holes or lying in their racks. I read the poems secondhand. Someone has creased the page. Did he begin then stop to sleep? to clean his gun perhaps? to listen to the bugler playing taps?

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads, Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads, Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death. For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple. There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple; And God will grow no talons at his heels, Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

At Arlington, 1866 The summer blew its little drifts of sound— Tangled with wet leaf-shadows and the light Small breath of scattered morning buds—around The yellow path through which our footsteps wound. Below, the Capitol rose glittering white. There stretched a sleeping army. One by one, They took their places until thousands met; No leader’s stars flashed on before, and none Leaned on his sword or stagger’d with his gun— I wonder if their feet have rested yet! They saw the dust, they joined the moving mass, They answer’d the fierce music’s cry for blood, Then straggled here and lay down in the grass:— Wear flowers for such, shores whence their feet did pass; Sing tenderly; O river’s haunted flood! They had been sick, and worn, and weary, when They stopp’d on this calm hill beneath the trees: Yet if, in some red-clouded dawn, again The country should be calling to her men, Shall the r[e]veill[e] not remember these? Around them underneath the mid-day skies The dreadful phantoms of the living walk, And by low moons and darkness with their cries— The mothers, sisters, wives with faded eyes, Who call still names amid their broken talk. And there is one who comes alone and stands At his dim fireless hearth—chill’d and oppress’d By Something he had summon’d to his lands, While the weird pallor of its many hands Points to his rusted sword in his own breast!

1 Out the barred window sandbags in a sagging wall surround the guard post where a soldier half-hidden by the flag holds his rifle on his knees and looks a little lost. It’s Sunday and quiet, the traffic noise off aways, the sea behind the post flat as the tarps pulled tight over the troop trucks. Somewhere down the hall soldiers are being boys, telling some joke in Arabic in which I’m pretty sure I hear the word “zubrak”: I walk between shelves loaded with canned rations, the cool expiring slowly in the high-ceilinged room while a pinned-up PSYOPS leaflet declares, If you sleep in a cemetery,you’re bound to have nightmares. 2 No one sees the doll’s decapitated head small and neat in rubble. Never tired or sleepy, the head is its own country obstinately surviving, the pupil of   its one eye peering through the glass’s pure transparency. And a few feet away lie its slim, plastic, long-legged thighs almost like an obscenity the eye watches over — no one in the street, nothing but bolt-marks from tank-treads scarring the concrete to give any of   it drama — and what about the way the lips’ frozen smirk keeps daring me to touch the sexless V between the thighs staring up at me? 3 The barracks dissolve into a reef   of   rubble in the fog. On either side of the road, crater after crater flashes with glints of glass, plastic bags, a chair leg clinging to a dismembered chair. The TV station, the power stacks thrusting up through mist, the black-bearded posters and banners strung across the streets lead to an absolute nowhere: all that’s left in the emptied town after the army pulled out are PSYOPS leaflets fluttering up around the car that winds down the coast road deeper into mist, headlights probing like instruments in a wound they illuminate the more they violate.

After the war perhaps I'll sit again Out on the terrace where I sat with you, And see the changeless sky and hills beat blue And live an afternoon of summer through. I shall remember then, and sad at heart For the lost day of happiness we knew, Wish only that some other man were you And spoke my name as once you used to do.