Deadline -- Barbara Kingsolver

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1212) Deadline The night before war begins, and you are still here. You can stand in a breathless cold ocean of candles, a thousand issues of your same face rubbed white from below by clear waxed light. A vigil. You are wondering what it is you can hold a candle to. You have a daughter. Her cheeks curve like aspects of the Mohammed's perfect pear. She is three. Too young for candles but you are here, this is war. Flames covet the gold-sparked ends of her hair, her nylon parka laughing in color, inflammable. It has taken your whole self to bring her undamaged to this moment, and waiting in the desert at this moment is a bomb that flings gasoline in a liquid sheet, a laundress's snap overhead, wide as the ancient Tigris, and ignites as it descends. The polls have sung their opera of assent: the land wants war. But here is another America, candle-throated, sure as tide. Whoever you are, you are also this granite anger. In history you will be the vigilant dead who stood in front of every war with old hearts in your pockets, stood on the carcass of hope listening for the thunder of its feathers. The desert is diamond ice and only stars above us here and elsewhere, a thousand issues of a clear waxed star, a holocaust of heaven and somewhere, a way out. -- Barbara Kingsolver

           January 15, 1991

Keeping with yesterday's Owen's submission, I add two more cents to the
gory word heap. Kingsolver, better known for her essays, captures the
landscape of the impending Gulf War perfectly. Since folks are back at
it again: same place, almost same time, same villains and same heroes,
only this time with "smart" bombs, perhaps smarter than those that
flung

     "...gasoline in a liquid sheet,
      a laundress's snap overhead, wide as the ancient Tigris,
      and ignites as it descends."

These lines bring up image of Kim Phuc, and her photograph as a little girl,
her clothes seared from her body by a Napalm bomb, running screaming from her
burning village, arms are outstretched in terror and pain. This in Vietnam.

Then the last two lines, "a holocaust of heaven/and somewhere, a way out."
resonate strongly with Bob Dylan's "All along the Watchtower":

    "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
    "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
    Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
    None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

If poets are "jokers", whose duty, as Lucille Clifton at a poetry reading here
said is "to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.", then I
think this poem does that very well.

There must be some way out of here... to peace!

Sashi

Links:

Kingsolver's Web Page
http://www.kingsolver.com/home/index.asp

Bob Dylan's lyric
http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/watchtower.html

Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize winning photo of the girl
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/museums/images/pgallery/gallery2.htm

Disabled -- Wilfred Owen

Guest poem sent in by Iftikhar Burhanuddin

(Poem #1211) Disabled He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn, Voices of play and pleasure after day, Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him. About this time Town used to swing so gay When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees, And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim, In the old times, before he threw away his knees. Now he will never feel again how slim Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands. All of them touch him like some queer disease. There was an artist silly for his face, For it was younger than his youth, last year. Now, he is old; his back will never brace; He's lost his colour very far from here, Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry, And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race And leap of purple spurted from his thigh. One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg, After the matches, carried shoulder-high. It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg, He thought he'd better join. He wonders why. Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts, That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg, Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts He asked to join. He didn't have to beg; Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years. Germans he scarcely thought of; all their guilt, And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes; And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears; Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits. And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers. Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal. Only a solemn man who brought him fruits Thanked him; and then enquired about his soul. Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes, And do what things the rules consider wise, And take whatever pity they may dole. Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes Passed from him to the strong men that were whole. How cold and late it is! Why don't they come And put him into bed? Why don't they come? -- Wilfred Owen

Ubiquitous pictures of dead/wounded soldiers/civilians in newspapers and on TV
create havoc in the mind.

So what better time to draw solace from the poignant yet beautiful
poetry of Wilfred Owen, the Great English Anti-War poet of WWI, who said,
"Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of
War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no
sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn.
That is why true Poets must be truthful."

[broken link] http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/owen/#L45
The above site has a bio of W.O and detailed lit. crit. of Disabled.

The wonderful lines describing the trauma of 'what was and what will never be'
- playing soccer, women, etc - are the best that I've read.

  "One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg,
   After the matches, carried shoulder-high.
   [snip]
   Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal."

I thought Owen's choice of metaphor of soccer for war was because of the
similarities between war and sport - the history-repeats-itself 'sport' of war
and the war-like strategies in sport - but here's a historical reason:

  "Dominic Hibberd has noted that this line can be linked to the
   recuiting poster of 1914, 'Will they never come?' (see 'Some
   Contemporary Allusions in Poems by Rosenberg, Owen and Sassoon',
   Notes and Queries August (1979), p.333. Several recruiting posters
   used the motif of linking sport to the army, and there were numerous
   recruiting drives at soccer matches."

To Peace.

Iftikhar

What Do I Care? -- Sara Teasdale

Guest poem sent in by atheos

(Poem #1210) What Do I Care? What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring, That my songs do not show me at all? For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire, I am an answer, they are only a call. But what do I care, for love will be over so soon, Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by, For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent, It is my heart that makes my songs, not I. -- Sara Teasdale

I liked the poem of hers that featured in Minstrels, so I looked for more by
her. And I found this defiant, slightly sad poem. She seems to believe in the
evanescence of things... more, she seems to scorn them, and herself for having
truck with them.

What I love is the note of 'Yes, I am weak to feel/do this, but this isn't
really me - it's someone else that I indulge.' There is a sense of something
strong and beautiful that endures the passing foolishness of a weak spirit.

She Speaks of Death -- Barbara Pescan

Guest poem sent in by John Beaty

(Poem #1209) She Speaks of Death Oblivion, she said in a weary voice, is what is after death. There is nothing after death but nothing and that's all right with me. It made good scientific sense, nailed to the cathedral door of her religious childhood. And when her husband died a few years later oblivion pinned against eternity sagged in the middle and in its folds sweet disbelief surprised her and the hope she hadn't seen the last of him yet. -- Barbara Pescan

        from "Morning Watch"

I ran across this poem while looking for something for a morning
service, and it just HIT me so hard. It completely captures (for me,
at any rate) the ambivalence of humanism.

John Beaty

[Martin adds]

I am reminded, too, of the last verse of Clough's "There is no God" (Poem #69):

    And almost everyone when age,
      Disease, or sorrows strike him,
    Inclines to think there is a God,
      Or something very like Him.

though Pescan's tone is a lot more sympathetic than Clough's is.

Untitled -- Yamabe no Akahito

Guest poem sent in by Jeffrey Sean Huo

(Poem #1208) Untitled The mists rise over The waters at Asuka; Memory does not Pass away so easily. -- Yamabe no Akahito

       (trans. K. Rexroth)

The poem in the original Japanese:

        Asuka gawa
        Kawa yodo sarazu
        Tatsu kiri no
        Omoi sugu beki
        Koi ni aranuku ni

The _Manyoshu_ (literally, "collection of ten-thousand leaves") is the most
ancient, and largest, compiled collection of Japanese poetry. Over 4,500 poems
were compiled into twenty books during the Nara Period (710 - 794 AD). The
_Manyoshu_ shows a wide variety of forms and topics, rather than the more
restrictive rules that would govern court poetry in later ages.

The _Manyoshu_ also is unusual for including poetry written from many different
social levels, from conscript soldiers up to members of the Imperial Family,
again in contrast to later works composed mostly by the nobility. While many of
the poems are anonymous, a score of different authors are identified by name.
Considered among the greatest of these is Yamabe no Akahito.

Little is actually known about Akahito beyond what is collected in the 50 poems
in the _Manyoshu_ that bear his name. He is famous for writing one of the first
known descriptions of Mt. Fuji (the area that is now modern Tokyo, where Mt.
Fuji lies, was then a swampy, thinly inhabited region, and would remain
insignificant for the next five-hundred years, while the capital remained
further west) and was considered by others to be one of the four great poets of
the _Manyoshu_. As hinted at by his poems about Mt. Fuji, it is believed he
traveled a great deal, at least some of that time in the company of the
Imperial Court for which apparently some of the poems were written. But Akahito
was most famous for being able to simply capture a thought or a scene in a few
short lines -- such as the poem I include here.

I have had, like Akahito, the great fortune of travelling many places in my
life. I have watched the white wisps dance across the waters of the Japanese
Inland Sea from the steps of the great shrine at Miyajima; I have seen the fog
rise from San Francisco Bay and the Chicago Lake Michigan coast; even just the
morning mist coming off the Huron River that runs behind the medical school at
which I now spend my days. And so I identify very much with Akahito's thoughts:
while, like mists and fog, the mornings and evenings of our lives come and go,
the memories that we take away endure.

Thank you,

-Jeff

[Martin adds]

Mist is one of those 'intrinsically poetic' topics - rich with connotations,
evoking a plethora of memories, and possessed of a number of well-accepted
metaphorical associations. This is a two-edged sword - a poem whose central
metaphor involves mist can easily slip into cliche. On the other hand, as
today's poem clearly shows, a good poet uses those associations as a tool
rather than as a crutch, and the result is often far better than if he had
totally eschewed familiar imagery in pursuit of 'originality'.

Akahito handles the image beautifully in today's poem - he has a very light
touch, subtly suggesting the flow and direction of the poem with simple,
unembellished statements, and creating an effect that is softly rather than
starkly elegant.

Interestingly, I read the poem quite differently from Jeffrey - I saw it as a
wistful commentary on his inability to let go of painful memories. Thinking
about it, this is likely because, for me, the image of mist imbues the poem
with a slightly melancholy tinge that then colours the second half.

martin

Links:
  Another exquisite poem on the mist is Sandburg's "Last Answers",
  Poem #713

  And on memories, see Poem #236