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Selected Poems

Page 17

by Harrison, Tony

doubtful, in these dark days, what poems can do,

  and watching the mists round Lindisfarne receding

  my doubt extends to Dark Age Good Book too.

  Eadfrith the Saxon scribe/illuminator

  incorporated cormorants I’m seeing fly

  round the same island thirteen centuries later

  into the In principio’s initial I.

  Billfrith’s begemmed and jewelled boards get looted

  by raiders gung-ho for booty and berserk,

  the sort of soldiery that’s still recruited

  to do today’s dictators’ dirty work,

  but the initials in St John and in St Mark

  graced with local cormorants in ages,

  we of a darker still keep calling Dark,

  survive in those illuminated pages.

  The word of God so beautifully scripted

  by Eadfrith and Billfrith the anchorite

  Pentagon conners have once again conscripted

  to gloss the cross on the precision sight.

  Candlepower, steady hand, gold leaf, a brush

  were all that Eadfrith had to beautify

  the word of God much bandied by George Bush

  whose word illuminated midnight sky

  and confused the Baghdad cock who was betrayed

  by bombs into believing day was dawning

  and crowed his heart out at the deadly raid

  and didn’t live to greet the proper morning.

  Now with noonday headlights in Kuwait

  and the burial of the blackened in Baghdad

  let them remember, all those who celebrate,

  that their good news is someone else’s bad

  or the light will never dawn on poor Mankind.

  Is it open-armed at all that victory V,

  that insular initial intertwined

  with slack-necked cormorants from black laquered sea,

  with trumpets bulled and bellicose and blowing

  for what men claim as victories in their wars,

  with the fire-hailing cock and all those crowing

  who don’t yet smell the dunghill at their claws?

  A Cold Coming

  ‘A cold coming we had of it.’

  (T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’)

  I saw the charred Iraqi lean

  towards me from bomb-blasted screen,

  his windscreen wiper like a pen

  ready to write down thoughts for men,

  his windscreen wiper like a quill

  he’s reaching for to make his will.

  I saw the charred Iraqi lean

  like someone made of Plasticine

  as though he’d stopped to ask the way

  and this is what I heard him say:

  ‘Don’t be afraid I’ve picked on you

  for this exclusive interview.

  Isn’t it your sort of poet’s task

  to find words for this frightening mask?

  If that gadget that you’ve got records

  words from such scorched vocal chords,

  press RECORD before some dog

  devours me mid-monologue.’

  So I held the shaking microphone

  closer to the crumbling bone:

  ‘I read the news of three wise men

  who left their sperm in nitrogen,

  three foes of ours, three wise Marines

  with sample flasks and magazines,

  three wise soldiers from Seattle

  who banked their sperm before the battle.

  Did No. 1 say: God be thanked

  I’ve got my precious semen banked.

  And No. 2: O Praise the Lord

  my last best shot is safely stored.

  And No. 3: Praise be to God

  I left my wife my frozen wad?

  So if their fate was to be gassed

  at least they thought their name would last,

  and though cold corpses in Kuwait

  they could by proxy procreate.

  Excuse a skull half roast, half bone

  for using such a scornful tone.

  It may seem out of all proportion

  but I wish I’d taken their precaution.

  They seemed the masters of their fate

  with wisely jarred ejaculate.

  Was it a propaganda coup

  to make us think they’d cracked death too,

  disinformation to defeat us

  with no post-mortem millilitres?

  Symbolic billions in reserve

  made me, for one, lose heart and nerve.

  On Saddam’s pay we can’t afford

  to go and get our semen stored.

  Sad to say that such high tech’s

  uncommon here. We’re stuck with sex.

  If you can conjure up and stretch

  your imagination (and not retch)

  the image of me beside my wife,

  closely clasped creating life …

  (I let the unfleshed skull unfold

  a story I’d been already told,

  and idly tried to calculate

  the content of ejaculate:

  the sperm in one ejaculation

  equals the whole Iraqi nation

  times, roughly, let’s say, 12.5

  though that .5’s not now alive.

  Let’s say the sperms were an amount

  so many times the body count,

  2,500 times at least

  (but let’s wait till the toll’s released!).

  Whichever way Death seems outflanked

  by one tube of cold bloblings banked.

  Poor bloblings, maybe you’ve been blessed

  with, of all fates possible, the best

  according to Sophocles i.e.

  ‘the best of fates is not to be’

  a philosophy that’s maybe bleak

  for any but an ancient Greek

  but difficult these days to escape

  when spoken to by such a shape.

  When you see men brought to such states

  who wouldn’t want that ‘best of fates’

  or in the world of Cruise and Scud

  not go cryonic if he could,

  spared the normal human doom

  of having made it through the womb?)

  He heard my thoughts and stopped the spool:

  ‘I never thought life futile, fool!

  Though all Hell began to drop

  I never wanted life to stop.

  I was filled with such a yearning

  to stay in life as I was burning,

  such a longing to be beside

  my wife in bed before I died,

  and, most, to have engendered there

  a child untouched by war’s despair.

  So press RECORD! I want to reach

  the warring nations with my speech.

  Don’t look away! I know it’s hard

  to keep regarding one so charred,

  so disfigured by unfriendly fire

  and think it once burned with desire.

  Though fire has flayed off half my features

  they once were like my fellow creatures’,

  till some screen-gazing crop-haired boy

  from Iowa or Illinois,

  equipped by ingenious technophile

  put paid to my paternal smile

  and made the face you see today

  an armature half-patched with clay,

  an icon framed, a looking glass

  for devotees of “kicking ass”,

  a mirror that returns the gaze

  of victors on their victory days

  and in the end stares out the watcher

  who ducks behind his headline: GOTCHA!

  or behind the flag-bedecked page 1

  of the true to bold-type-setting SUN!

  I doubt victorious Greeks let Hector

  join their feast as spoiling spectre,

  and who’d want to sour the children’s joy

  in Iowa or Illinois

&nb
sp; or ageing mothers overjoyed

  to find their babies weren’t destroyed?

  But cabs beflagged with SUN front pages

  don’t help peace in future ages.

  Stars and Stripes in sticky paws

  may sow the seeds for future wars.

  Each Union Jack the kids now wave

  may lead them later to the grave.

  But praise the Lord and raise the banner

  (excuse a skull’s sarcastic manner!)

  Desert Rat and Desert Stormer

  without scars and (maybe) trauma,

  the semen-bankers are all back

  to sire their children in their sack.

  With seed sown straight from the sower

  dump second-hand spermatozoa!

  Lie that you saw me and I smiled

  to see the soldier hug his child.

  Lie and pretend that I excuse

  my bombing by B52s,

  pretend I pardon and forgive

  that they still do and I don’t live,

  pretend they have the burnt man’s blessing

  and then, maybe, I’m spared confessing

  that only fire burnt out the shame

  of things I’d done in Saddam’s name,

  the deaths, the torture and the plunder

  the black clouds all of us are under.

  Say that I’m smiling and excuse

  the Scuds we launched against the Jews.

  Pretend I’ve got the imagination

  to see the world beyond one nation.

  That’s your job, poet, to pretend

  I want my foe to be my friend.

  It’s easier to find such words

  for this dumb mask like baked dogturds.

  So lie and say the charred man smiled

  to see the soldier hug his child.

  This gaping rictus once made glad

  a few old hearts back in Baghdad,

  hearts growing older by the minute

  as each truck comes without me in it.

  I’ve met you though, and had my say

  which you’ve got taped. Now go away.’

  I gazed at him and he gazed back

  staring right through me to Iraq.

  Facing the way the charred man faced

  I saw the frozen phial of waste,

  a test-tube frozen in the dark,

  crib and Kaaba, sacred Ark,

  a pilgrimage of Cross and Crescent

  the chilled suspension of the Present.

  Rainbows seven shades of black

  curved from Kuwait back to Iraq,

  and instead of gold the frozen crock’s

  crammed with Mankind on the rocks,

  the congealed geni who won’t thaw

  until the World renounces War,

  cold spunk meticulously jarred

  never to be charrer or the charred,

  a bottled Bethlehem of this come-

  curdling Cruise/Scud-cursed millennium.

  I went. I pressed rewind and play

  and I heard the charred man say:

  Three Poems from Bosnia

  1. The Cycles of Donji Vakuf

  We take Emerald to Bugojno, then the Opal route

  to Donji Vakuf where Kalashnikovs still shoot

  at retreating Serbs or at the sky

  to drum up the leaden beat of victory.

  Once more, though this time Serbian, homes

  get pounded to façades like honeycombs.

  This time it’s the Bosnian Muslims’ turn

  to ‘cleanse’ a taken town, to loot, and burn.

  Donji Vakuf fell last night at 11.

  Victory’s signalled by firing rounds to Heaven

  and for the god to whom their victory’s owed.

  We see some victors cycling down the road

  on bikes that they’re too big for. They feel so tall

  as victors, all conveyances seem small,

  but one, whose knees keep bumping on his chin,

  rides a kid’s cycle, with a mandolin,

  also childish size, strapped to the saddle,

  jogging against him as he tries to pedal.

  His machine gun and the mandolin impede

  his furious pedalling, and slow down the speed

  appropriate to victors, huge-limbed and big-booted,

  and he’s defeated by the small bike that he’s looted.

  The luckiest looters come down dragging cattle,

  two and three apiece they’ve won in battle.

  A goat whose udder seems about to burst

  squirts her milk to quench a victor’s thirst

  which others quench with a shared beer, as a cow,

  who’s no idea she’s a Muslim’s now,

  sprays a triumphal arch of piss across

  the path of her new happy Bosnian boss.

  Another struggles with stuffed rucksack, gun, and bike,

  small and red, he knows his kid will like,

  and he hands me his Kalashnikov to hold

  to free his hands. Rain makes it wet and cold.

  When he’s balanced his booty, he makes off,

  for a moment forgetting his Kalashnikov,

  which he slings with all his looted load

  on to his shoulder, and trudges down the road

  where a solitary reaper passes by,

  scythe on his shoulder, wanting fields to dry,

  hoping, listening to the thunder, that the day

  will brighten up enough to cut his hay.

  And tonight some small boy will be glad

  he’s got the present of a bike from soldier dad,

  who braved the Serb artillery and fire

  to bring back a scuffed red bike with one flat tyre.

  And among the thousands fleeing north, another

  with all his gladness gutted, with his mother,

  knowing the nightmare they are cycling in,

  will miss the music of his mandolin.

  (Donji Vakuf, 14 September 1995)

  2. The Bright Lights of Sarajevo

  After the hours that Sarajevans pass

  queuing with empty canisters of gas

  to get the refills they wheel home in prams,

  or queuing for the precious meagre grams

  of bread they’re rationed to each day,

  and often dodging snipers on the way,

  or struggling up sometimes eleven flights

  of stairs with water, then you’d think that the nights

  of Sarajevo would be totally devoid

  of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed,

  but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case –

  The young go walking at a stroller’s pace,

  black shapes impossible to mark

  as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark.

  In unlit streets you can’t distinguish who

  calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh.

  All take the evening air with stroller’s stride,

  no torches guide them but they don’t collide

  except as one of the flirtatious ploys

  when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by some boy’s.

  Then the tender radar of the tone of voice

  shows by its signals she approves his choice.

  Then match or lighter to a cigarette

  to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.

  And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed

  beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test

  and he’s about, I think, to take her hand

  and lead her away from where they stand

  on two shell splash scars, where in ’92

  Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue

  and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread

  lay on the pavement with the broken dead.

  And at their feet in holes made by the mortar

  that caused the massacre, now full of water

  from the rain that’s poure
d down half the day,

  though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away,

  leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky

  ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye,

  in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees

  fragments of the splintered Pleiades,

  sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells

  splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells.

  The dark boy shape leads dark girl shape away

  to share one coffee in a candlelit café

  until the curfew, and he holds her hand

  behind AID flour sacks refilled with sand.

  (Sarajevo, 20 September 1995)

  3. Essentials

  (Conversation with a Croat)

  ‘I looked at my Shakespeares and said NO!

  I looked at my Sartres, which I often read

  by candlelight, and couldn’t let them go

  even at this time of direst need.

  Because he was a Fascist like our Chetnik foes

  I lingered for a while at my Célines …

  but he’s such a serious stylist, so I chose

  Das Kapital to cook my AID canned beans!’

  (Sarajevo, 20 September 1995)

  Fruitility

  What a glorious gift from Gaia

  raspberries piled on papaya,

  which as a ruse to lift my soul

  I serve up in my breakfast bowl,

  and, contemplating, celebrate

  nature’s fruit, and man’s air-freight

  speeding my fruit breakfast here

  through tropo- and through stratosphere.

  I praise papaya and celebrate

  the man who packed it in its crate,

  the worker or Hawaiian grower

  in Kipahula or Pahoa,

  the worried cultivator who

  scans the sky from Honomu,

  with global warming getting higher

  than is good for his papaya;

  worries I myself had known

  when, in Nigeria, I’d grown

  what we called pawpaws of my own;

  picked, deseeded, served fridge-fresh

  I fed my kids their orange flesh.

  I gave my kids fruit to repeat

  the way I once got fruit to eat,

  not so exotic but the start

  of all my wonder and my art.

  My mother taught me to adore

  the fruit she scrounged us in the War,

  scarce, and marred with pock and wart

  nonetheless the fruit she brought

  taught me, very young, to savour

  the gift of fruit, its flesh and flavour.

  Adoring apples I’ve linked Eve’s

  with my mother’s ripe James Grieves

  no God could ever sour with sin

  or jinx the juice all down my chin.

  Still in my dreams my mother comes

 

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