A gathering of Poems for Peace: in the ongoing dream of the total abolition of war.
| What is poetry which does not save Nations or people? A connivance with official lies, A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, Readings for sophomore girls. That I wanted good poetry without knowing it, That I discovered, late, its salutary aim, In this and only this I find salvation.
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| Peace When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut, Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it? O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite, That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo, He comes to brood and sit.
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Walking in the Woods
When I walked into the woods today,
Two partridge flew up – they disappeared
Explosively into the overly calm
Pines on their darkening slope.
Oh, we all do that: We each
Disappear into shady pines, we each
Break off our writing, because we can never
Get over how it feels to be surprised.
Robert Bly
When I walked into the woods today,
Two partridge flew up – they disappeared
Explosively into the overly calm
Pines on their darkening slope.
Oh, we all do that: We each
Disappear into shady pines, we each
Break off our writing, because we can never
Get over how it feels to be surprised.
Robert Bly
| War’s Season October 2002 First cold spell of the fall. The frost settling in over the yards. The last plants waiting the sun to arrive as down the coast men debate the logic of a war they say will come upon us as surely as the next season. Hollow speeches of empty men bang off walls of empty chambers. Good men and women try to speak and are silenced. They hear already the sound of coins falling one by one into metered slots, wake to the noise of distant engines starting up in the morning. They fear it is Death is behind the wheel, once more hungry for his harvest.
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[William Drummond, 1585-1649, was born in Midlothian in Scotland and became Laird of Hawthornden; he was a leisured poet and inventor, master of the sonnet in its Italianate style, mannered and decorated. A friend of Ben Jonson. In troubled times he tried to avoid political involvement but had to defend his writings before covenanting committees; he argued for freedom of opinion. He wrote an essay, Irene, which was a plea for peace] They Doth then the world go thus, doth all thus move? Is this the justice which on Earth we find? Is this that firm decree which all doth bind? Are these your influences, Powers above? Those souls which vice’s moody mists most blind, Blind Fortune, blindly, most their friend doth prove; And they who thee, poor idol Virtue! love, Ply like a feather toss’d by storm and wind. Ah! if a Providence doth sway this all Why should best minds groan under most distress? Or why should pride humility make thrall, And injuries the innocent oppress? Heavens! hinder, stop this fate; or grant a time When good may have, as well as bad, their prime!
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- This book is not about heroes.
English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything
about glory, honour, might,
majesty, dominion, or power, except war.
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.
Wilfred Owen
| The Disappointed And in the dream thousands of young women and men were wading slowly out into the lake, the bottom-mud sucked them further and further until they disappeared with that soundless howl possible in dreams though audible day by day around us, here, in this country, and now, at this time. Can a poem touch on the soul of politics? or tell how the blood-sheen on claw and bill of the chough is beautiful beyond their machinations? Do they know how good it is to sleep by an uncurtained window while the dark side of the mountain looms as guardian and a high star shades from gold to turquoise-white? Can they tell how the skylark fills its own lake full high above the sand-dunes with its water-fire music, can they bring the scent of cotton, heather, the warming bog into their chambers where they hurl lies and accusations across our hurting space? The Christ, the poem says, waltzed across lake water, is alive, in light, and stone, and bone and do you hear Him? You the anointed of the people, the disappointed, the disappointing. John F. Deane |
Sabbaths
IV
The times are disgusting enough,
surely, for those who long for peace
and truth. But self-disgust
also is an injury: the coming
of bodily uncertainty with age
and wear, forgetfulness of things
that ought to be remembered,
remembrance of things best forgot.
Forgive this fragmentary life.
Sabbaths
IX
Before we kill another child
for righteousness’ sake, to serve
some blissful killer’s sacred cause,
some bloody patriot’s anthem
and his flag, let us leave forever
our ancestral lands, our holy books,
our god thoughtified to the mean
of our smallest selves. Let us go
to the graveyard and lie down
forever among the speechless stones.
- Wendell Berry
| Month’s Mind (11 October - 2001) A month from what happened and again the sky bright blue, burnished by autumn, the air buoyant with all its innocent energies, as if nothing had ever happened to stain the face, as they say, of heaven, altering everything. We go about our business, taking trains and buses, choking the roads with traffic, watching the coat of many colours open each evening with more news of the world, the hundred tongues chattering, though you know there is no remedy. Apt, so, when your dead cousin comes back in his mohair suit and polished shoes and says, “Let everyone wear black!” Let’s draw the angel’s face in mascara, so no tear blotches a line. Love is fugitive again, dodging between the carousel and the rocky coffin. And consider your own home-made daily table, where father, daughter, grand-daughter and grand-daughter’s father break bread together, evening after evening, in the broken silence peculiar to such ceremonies of the half-said. Meantime, in the world more available to the newspapers (paparazzi of the latest atrocity, he said, jumping the queue of outstretched hands, its string quartet for bones and begging cup) this thing goes on happening.
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| Nonce Words The road taken to bypass Cavan took me west, (a sign mistaken) so at Derrylin I turned east. Sun on ice, white floss on reed and bush, the bridge cast in an advent silence I drove across, then pulled in, parked and sat breathing mist on the windscreen. Requiescat. . . I got out well happed up, stood at the frozen shore gazing at rimed horizon, my first stop like this in years. And blessed myself in the name of the nonce and happenstance, the Who knows and What nexts and So be its.
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| At Point Lookout Civil War Prison Monument, Maryland The water has risen, everything above it as quiet as heat on the saw-grass. Thousands died here. A marsh now, the bay swept over the camps, clawing the land back to sea. All those men. We tell ourselves about the past, and when we’re old enough to understand, realize we are the past. Our hearts sink in marshland. Places that once held buildings and dreams are swamped by our mistakes, overtaken by the sweep of what we’ve done in the name of anything, not all of it necessary. That much we know, but only when the water claims us, our hair is falling, and the light that was our eyes is flooding away. George Evans |
| The Conscientious Objector Discharge You will have to take a last physical, and fill out a set of insurance forms. You'll get a lawyer to clear you, and a shrink to say you are sane, but they both know that already and are secretly glad to do anything against this war. Someone else, maybe a friend at the bursar's will make sure you get your back pay. Someone else will open up three free afternoons of sunlight leave, and two nights in between. Savour it at Denny's where the stupid, endless menu will seem as bright as your future might be with the waitress. In the morning of what is your last minute in, let us say around ten a.m., that nothing-hour where no one gets hurt and no one is pissed, while you stand in a line before a corporal's desk you will tell the Marine Corps for the last time that yes you are certain and no you will not do this anymore. The floorboards will groan and it may sound like grieving. I say go ahead, take what you have been given today, and fold it into a neatly-creased half. Then knock on the doorframe and step out, let your feet as they hit the gravel make it chatter, and listen, listen hard to this path you are on. What the gravel is saying is you did not kill anyone today. The stones will sound as if you are walking on water. Fred Marchant, The Looking House |
| You were silly like us: your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. W.H.Auden from “In Memory of W.B.Yeats” On Being Asked for a War Poem I think it better that in times like these A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter’s night. W.B.Yeats |
On Being Asked To Write A Poem
Against The War In Vietnam
Well I have and in fact
more than one and I'll
tell you this too
I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against
Korea and another
against the one
I was in
and I don't remember
how many against
the three
when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County
and not one
breath was restored
to one
shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not
one
but death went on and on
never looking aside
except now and then
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.
Hayden Carruth
Against The War In Vietnam
Well I have and in fact
more than one and I'll
tell you this too
I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against
Korea and another
against the one
I was in
and I don't remember
how many against
the three
when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County
and not one
breath was restored
to one
shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not
one
but death went on and on
never looking aside
except now and then
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.
Hayden Carruth