![]() Not the starving river, brackish and torn. When the trouble was done he would take back the farm, Rain came rarely to the white wood valley.Ĭut rhubarb and gooseberries, brought flowersįrom the hill: camel-thorn in winter, rest-harrow What happened to him once they'd kicked his ass? Where was Saddam when they found him at last? Once inside the Mosque, describe what you saw. What's your understanding of 'shock' and 'awe'? On what was the prisoner stripped and stretched?Įxtraordinary Rendition - give me some names. When did the President give you the date? ![]() With which piece did you capture the castle? "Untidiness" is how the then secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, described the looting from the Iraq National Museum. Some time after the looting, the locked gates, This government that drowns our children in their sleep Untidiness War on TerrorĬut from a navel remains buried under a tamarind tree To the sound at dusk, cantata of despair, To a silent Wiltshire town at a last parade To a chanting crowd fisting the foetid air To the rattled air, the growl of the grenade To the soldier's words, "It's World War One out here" To a mother dumb with shock who locks her doorĪnd sits alone, taking the news to heart To the widow's wail as she crouches in the rubble The scream that ripped the morning's rising heat To the first foot to tread the viper's head, In the blood-red mountains of Afghanistan To that voice again, years and miles from then, In Samarkand: the call to prayer at dawn To the chant that tranced me thirty years ago Of a butterfly's bootless invasion? Listen That the closing of wings causes a tremor?Īs for eyes, are eyes ready for the soft dance How will human arms handle the death of weapons?Īnd what of ears, are ears so tuned to sirens When the dust of peace has settled on a nation, Without the adrenalin of a bullet's blood-rush? With the official inquiry into Iraq imminent and the war in Afghanistan returning dead teenagers to the streets of Wootton Bassett, I invited a range of my fellow poets to bear witness, each in their own way, to these matters of war. Today, as most of us do, poets largely experience war - wherever it rages - through emails or texts from friends or colleagues in war zones, through radio or newsprint or television, through blogs or tweets or interviews. War, it seems, makes poets of soldiers and not the other way round. They might be poet-journalists like James Fenton, the last foreign correspondent to leave Saigon after it fell to the Viet Cong in 1975, or electrifying anti-war performance poets, like the late Adrian Mitchell, or brilliant retellers of Homer's Trojan wars, like Christopher Logue. Such lines are part of the English poetry reader's DNA, injected during schooldays like a vaccine.īut other poems - not all by soldiers - also come to mind: Walt Whitman's civil war poems the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, written (or memorised) during the Stalinist terrors Lorca's poems from the Spanish civil war the poems of the brilliant young Keith Douglas who was killed in the second world war the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert from eastern Europe and Mahmoud Darwish from the Middle East, and of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley from Northern Ireland.īritish poets in our early 21st century do not go to war, as Keith Douglas did and Edward Thomas before him. What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?. In modern times, the young soldiers of the first world war turned the horrors they endured and witnessed in trench combat - which slaughtered them in their millions - into a vividly new kind of poetry, and most of us, when we think of "war poetry" will find the names of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon coming first to our lips, with Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke. It is the poet's obligation, wrote Plato, to bear witness. Poets, from ancient times, have written about war.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |