Guest poem sent in by Reed C Bowman , who
writes:
Some time back I sent in James Fenton's 'The Ballad of the Imam and the
Shah'. In correspondence afterward, I mentioned another poem from the
same collection. Though the Imam and the Shah is what first called my
attention to Fenton, I think this one has become my favorite - bleak
though it is.
( Poem #1183) Out of the East Out of the South came Famine.
Out of the West came Strife.
Out of the North came a storm cone
And out of the East came a warrior wind
And it struck you like a knife.
Out of the East there shone a sun
As the blood rose on the day
And it shone on the work of the warrior wind
And it shone on the heart
And it shone on the soul
And they called the sun - Dismay.
And it's a far cry from the jungle
To the city of Phnom Penh
And many try
And many die
Before they can see their homes again
And it's a far cry from the paddy track
To the palace of the king
And many go
Before they know
It's a far cry.
It's a war cry.
Cry for the war that can do this thing.
A foreign soldier came to me
And he gave me a gun
And he predicted victory
Before the year was done.
He taught me how to kill a man.
He taught me how to try.
Be he forgot to say to me
How an honest man should die.
He taught me how to kill a man
Who was my enemy
But never how to kill a man
Who'd been a friend to me.
You fought the way a hero fights -
You had no need to fear
My friend, but you are wounded now
And I'm not allowed to leave you here
Alive.
Out of the East came Anger
And it walked a dusty road
And it stopped when it came to a river bank
And it pitched a camp
And it gazed across
To where the city stood
When
Out of the West came thunder
But it came without a sound
For it came at the speed of the warrior wind
And it fell on the heart
And it fell on the soul
And it shook the battleground
And it's a far cry from the cockpit
To the foxhole in the clay
And we were a
Coordinate
In a foreign land
Far away
And it's a far cry from the paddy track
To the palace of the king
And many try
And they ask why
It's a far cry.
It's a war cry.
Cry for the war that can do this thing.
Next year the army came for me
And I was sick and thin
And they put a weapon in our hands
And they told us we would win
And they feasted us for seven days
And they slaughtered a hundred cattle
And we sang our songs of victory
And the glory of the battle
And they sent us down the dusty roads
In the stillness of the night
And when the city heard from us
It burst in a flower of light.
The tracer bullets found us out.
The guns were never wrong
And the gunship said Regret Regret
The words of your victory song.
Out of the North came an army
And it was clad in black
And out of the South came a gun crew
With a hundred shells
And a howitzer
And we walked in black along the paddy track
When
Out of the West came napalm
And it tumbled from the blue
And it spread at the speed of the warrior wind
And it clung to the heart
And it clung to the soul
As napalm is designed to do
And it's a far cry from the fireside
To the fire that finds you there
In the foxhole
By the temple gate
The fire that finds you everywhere
And it's a far cry from the paddy track
To the palace of the king
And many try
And they ask why
It's a far cry.
It's a war cry.
Cry for the war that can do this thing.
My third year in the army
I was sixteen years old
And I had learnt enough, my friend,
To believe what I was told
And I was told that we would take
The city of Phnom Penh
And they slaughtered all the cows we had
And they feasted us again
And at last we were given river mines
And we blocked the great Mekong
And now we trained our rockets on
The landing-strip at Pochentong.
The city lay within our grasp.
We only had to wait.
We only had to hold the line
By the foxhole, by the temple gate
When
Out of the West came clusterbombs
And they burst in a hundred shards
And every shard was a new bomb
And it burst again
Upon our men
As they gasped for breath in the temple yard.
Out of the West came a new bomb
And it sucked away the air
And it sucked at the heart
And it sucked at the soul
And it found a lot of children there
And it's a far cry from the temple yard
To the map of the general staff
From the grease pen to the gasping men
To the wind that blows the soul like chaff
And it's a far cry from the paddy track
To the palace of the king
And many go
Before they know
It's a far cry.
It's a war cry.
Cry for the war that has done this thing.
A foreign soldier came to me
And he gave me a gun
And the liar spoke of victory
Before the year was done.
What would I want with victory
In the city of Phnom Penh?
Punish the city! Punish the people!
What would I want but punishment?
We have brought the king home to his palace.
We shall leave him there to weep
And we'll go back along the paddy track
For we have promises to keep.
For the promise made in the foxhole,
For the oath in the temple yard,
For the friend I killed on the battlefield
I shall make that punishment hard.
Out of the South came Famine.
Out of the West came Strife.
Out of the North came a storm cone
And out of the East came a warrior wind
And it struck you like a knife.
Out of the East there shone a sun
As the blood rose on the day
And it shone on the work of the warrior wind
And it shone on the heart
And it shone on the soul
And they called the sun Dismay, my friend,
They called the sun - Dismay.
-- James Fenton |
I don't have a lot to say about the poem itself. I think the driving
strength of Fenton's unusual meters gives his poems, especially his
bleak war poems, a great power of vividness and immediacy. I like a poet
who can throw the almost playful onomatopoeia of 'the gunship said
Regret Regret', into a desperately serious poem (or is it reverse
onomatopoeia? Is there a word for this articulation into real words of
an inarticulate sound? A specialized case of personification, I suppose).
This poem, like 'The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah', was set to music
early in its life - for a 'pocket musical' titled _Out of the East_,
performed in Paris in 1990 - and may or may not have been written
originally with music in mind. I must say - with utmost subjectivity -
the oddly facile repetition in the final two lines disappoints me much
in the way many song lyrics do when transcribed to read as poetry. But
the poem stands despite it. [I agree - the last two lines were
definitely detrimental to my appreciation of the poem, especially
occupying the crucial position they did. Nonetheless, this is far too
good a poem to be spoilt by a bad ending - martin]
'Out of the East' recurred to my mind, and I first intended to send it,
early in the USAmerican campaigns in Afghanistan. It occurred to me that
the poem was about what happened in a poor country, torn by tribal
conflict and blindsided by the incursion of the wars of neighbors, when
a ruthless, ideologically extreme group arose to give its battered
people a blind purpose, fed with all the weapons the first world could
provide, then touched off by undeclared retributive war from the West
against a desperate army illegally basing itself in - and partially
controlling the politics of - that same crumbling country. The situation
sounded unfortunately familiar. It may well be, and it is certainly to
be hoped that I was wrong in my knee-jerk comparison of the situation of
Afghanistan with Cambodia. But time alone will tell.
RCB
[Martin adds]
As I have mentioned before, I am always on the lookout for new 'voices'
in poetry, particularly in massively popular genres like love and war
poetry. That is to say, not just new poets, but poets with whole new
perspectives, both on the subject and on its presentation. Fenton has
been a very welcome addition to my list of distinctively-voiced war
poets - many thanks to Reed for introducing me to him.
Tangentially, the phrase 'Out of the East' called Tolkien's "The Lord of
the Rings" to mind, and in particular the bit immediately following the
Lament for Boromir [Poem #46]:
'You left the East Wind to me,' said Gimli, 'but I will say naught of
it.'
'That is as it should be,' said Aragorn. 'In Minas Tirith they endure
the East Wind, but they do not ask it for tidings.'
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