502 War poems

Where do you want ghosts to reside? In our wakeful hours there are flowers which produce nightmares We burned continents of silence   the future of nations the breathing of the fighters got thicker   became like oxen’s there is in that breath sparkles of scorched flesh and the fainting of stars we crucify Gilgamesh on a TANK Viking II reaches Mars Imam Ali dances over a nuclear blast cursed are the clouds which repel water cursed are the Arabs who fell tall and haggard eucalyptus trees

When the living rot on the bodies of the dead When the combatants’ teeth become knives When words lose their meaning and become arsenic When the aggressors’ nails become claws When old friends hurry to join the carnage When the victors’ eyes become live shells When clergymen pick up the hammer and crucify When officials open the door to the enemy When the mountain peoples’ feet weigh like elephants When roses grow only in cemeteries When they eat the Palestinian’s liver before he’s even dead When the sun itself has no other purpose than being a shroud the human tide moves on . . .

In the dark irritation of the eyes there is a snake hiding In the exhalations of Americans there is a crumbling empire In the foul waters of the rivers there are Palestinians OUT OUT of its borders pain has a leash on its neck In the wheat stalks there are insects vaccinated against bread In the Arabian boats there are sharks shaken with laughter In the camel’s belly there are blind highways OUT OUT of TIME there is spring’s shattered hope In the deluge on our plains there are no rains but stones

The war was over. We sutured the wounded, buried the dead, sat at the bar with the enemy, near the blue throat of the sea. A sushi chef slivered salmon into orchids, etched clouds from oysters, as they rose snowing pearls. From shrimp and seaweed he shaped hummingbirds, which hovered above our heads. With the world’s smallest blade he carved from yellowfin, miniature flanks of horses. They cantered around our hands.

He danced with tall grass for a moment, like he was swaying with a woman. Our gun barrels glowed white-hot. When I got to him, a blue halo of flies had already claimed him. I pulled the crumbled photograph from his fingers. There's no other way to say this: I fell in love. The morning cleared again, except for a distant mortar & somewhere choppers taking off. I slid the wallet into his pocket & turned him over, so he wouldn't be kissing the ground.

For Peter S. I saw the shrouds of prisoners like baptismal gowns buried outside the cemetery. On the canvas frills exhaled singed wool and cardboard. The angels arrived as lace. Took notes, then stuck. Awful residue from a small cut. • The veil has been ripped from the skin where it was burned in. The skin is the veil, the baby-material, imprinted on, as if one dropped the handkerchief and it was one’s wrist. The cuff is frightening. Stuffed onto oil. Water-stains might fence its ghost in. • “The barbed wire complex” I understand. Winged and flattened at the same time, poor things! Some leftover specters of blood. Remember Blake’s figures like columns with heads looking around for God? When events are not as random as they seem. • The article of clothing is only half there, it’s not full, but when it falls forward, it is. Terrible emptiness of the spread neckline and little sleeve. Half-cooked squares. Was this religious fire and is this where it passed? Maybe they are floating on water of paint, pool-sized, blue and ridged like foam. You would have to fly to see them flat as a map. The rib and hem. Rained on for eons. Noah’s children’s floating forms. • Angels die? It’s a frightening-miracle because here they are. The Upper God has let them drop like centuries into space. And I recognize them!

To yield force to is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at best an act of prudence. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon, it could be for a wedding, or it could be for you. Always enter a home with your right foot; the left is for cemeteries and unclean places. O-guf! Tera armeek is rarely useful. It means Stop! Or I’ll shoot. Sabah el khair is effective. It means Good morning. Inshallah means Allah be willing. Listen well when it is spoken. You will hear the RPG coming for you. Not so the roadside bomb. There are bombs under the overpasses, in trashpiles, in bricks, in cars. There are shopping carts with clothes soaked in foogas, a sticky gel of homemade napalm. Parachute bombs and artillery shells sewn into the carcasses of dead farm animals. Graffiti sprayed onto the overpasses: I will kell you, American. Men wearing vests rigged with explosives walk up, raise their arms and say Inshallah. There are men who earn eighty dollars to attack you, five thousand to kill. Small children who will play with you, old men with their talk, women who offer chai— and any one of them may dance over your body tomorrow.

And if all those who meet or even hear of you become witness to what you are— a white country of blight beneath the last snows of spring. Could we remain quiet on earth and bear it, the war we make inside what is—it’s a long time to be here, to be still, to feel the rot inside now—bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars at the edge of a field where we are once again taken from ourselves. Could we remain here, witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply, each birdsong or siren extinguished where some trueness abides, some portion we have lost our right to claim or know. It comes into any mind that would perceive it, leaf-rot, speech-rot, the deliberate ribcage of the deer, these abrupt chalk cliffs over which the confused animals fling themselves, and you, obscure, receive no response that is not suffered as the days grow long and distortions come to seem the natural course of things— what trees whose creatures stray into space— and they find they cannot land though the eyelid struggles open—no answer, no resolution— a window opened to the mute green world, weedy and driftless, a wind drilling rain, dirt, the parameters of uncertainty, of hope, what we might be against what we have done, bees crawling through the lips of the one who would say the earth turned into sour flesh— What strange rooms, what soundless movement of sky over desert where the flesh again is beaten and the emptiness extends itself while some old man looks on, a raptor in waiting, the sand-field around them blown thinly toward sun—no longer ourselves in the afternoons, evenings, weak, vague, clutched at the mouth— because we did nothing, because we lost count.

The birds against the April wind Flew northward, singing as they flew; They sang, “The land we leave behind Has swords for corn-blades, blood for dew.” “O wild-birds, flying from the South, What saw and heard ye, gazing down?” “We saw the mortar’s upturned mouth, The sickened camp, the blazing town! “Beneath the bivouac’s starry lamps, We saw your march-worn children die; In shrouds of moss, in cypress swamps, We saw your dead uncoffined lie. “We heard the starving prisoner’s sighs And saw, from line and trench, your sons Follow our flight with home-sick eyes Beyond the battery’s smoking guns.” “And heard and saw ye only wrong And pain,” I cried, “O wing-worn flocks?” “We heard,” they sang, “the freedman’s song, The crash of Slavery’s broken locks! “We saw from new, uprising States The treason-nursing mischief spurned, As, crowding Freedom’s ample gates, The long-estranged and lost returned. “O’er dusky faces, seamed and old, And hands horn-hard with unpaid toil, With hope in every rustling fold, We saw your star-dropt flag uncoil. “And struggling up through sounds accursed, A grateful murmur clomb the air; A whisper scarcely heard at first, It filled the listening heavens with prayer. “And sweet and far, as from a star, Replied a voice which shall not cease, Till, drowning all the noise of war, It sings the blessed song of peace!” So to me, in a doubtful day Of chill and slowly greening spring, Low stooping from the cloudy gray, The wild-birds sang or seemed to sing. They vanished in the misty air, The song went with them in their flight; But lo! they left the sunset fair, And in the evening there was light.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men have said, That you'll remember. For you need not so. Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know It is not curses heaped on each gashed head? Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow. Nor honour. It is easy to be dead. Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto, “Yet many a better one has died before.” Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you Perceive one face that you loved heretofore, It is a spook. None wears the face you knew. Great death has made all his for evermore.