War Poetry

usna09mom · March 24, 2006, 10:42pm

<h1>This was on the Jim Lehrer NewsHour (Public Television) this week.</h1>

"My name is Wyatt Prunty and I served in the Navy during Vietnam.

I was a near-sighted gunnery officer and I don’t think I hurt anyone.

That was a difficult time for many; difficult for some of us because while we disagreed with the war itself, we believed we could not refuse to serve.

Years later, I started the Sewanee’s Writer’s conference and Sewanee, Tennessee is where I now live and write.

My wife and I have watched the NewsHour since its beginning, which means we’ve had a good long marriage.

For three years we’ve studied the faces of soldiers from all regions and backgrounds in America. They are the ones the NewsHour has broadcast as its “honor roll.”

What I’m going to read is a response to those lost, yet so permanently-set people, whose lives are our mute gift.

The poem is called: “The Returning Dead.”

usna09mom · March 24, 2006, 10:45pm

The Returning Dead

Each night I make a drink and wait for them
They have become the day’s concluding news,
Installments from a world without anthems
Or children, unfocusing eyes

A question that repeatedly rejects
My easy terms. They are ones who believed
And acted in the narrow and select
Ways handed them, while ordinary lives

Ran on without interruption
Or bad pictures, as though nothing had changed
Change is the one unanswerable question
Of these faces. The world can rearrange

Itself repeatedly, but these remain
The same, silent in everything they lack;
That’s what they’ve come to, in places with names
Like Afghanistan, Iraq,

And this is the way it happens: the words
Are old - mother, father, home - and will catch
Surrounding currents in the slow absurd
Descending will of any river etched

Out of a landscape history refines
To myth. The TV blanks between
Segments, but every static face defines
Itself, holds stubbornly its private scene

Fixed, publicly, as we are led
Back to that little negative whose lack
Is each of us, staring the staring dead,
Leaning, sometimes like grief itself; then straightening back.

usna09mom · March 26, 2006, 6:11pm

The Sea-Wife

There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
And a wealthy wife is she;
She breeds a breed o’ rovin’ men
And casts them over sea.

And some are drowned in deep water,
And some in sight o’ shore,
And word goes back to the weary wife
And ever she sends more.

For since that wife had gate or gear,
Or hearth or garth or bield,
She willed her sons to the white harvest,
And that is a bitter yield.

She wills her sons to the wet ploughing,
To ride the horse of tree,
And syne her sons come back again
Far-spent from out the sea.

The good wife’s sons come home again
With little into their hands,
But the lore of men that ha’ dealt with men
In the new and naked lands;

But the faith of men that ha’ brothered men
By more than easy breath,
And the eyes o’ men that ha’ read wi’ men
In the open books of death.

Rich are they, rich in wonders seen,
But poor in the goods o’ men;
So what they ha’ got by the skin o’ their teeth
They sell for their teeth again.

For whether they lose to the naked life
Or win to their hearts’ desire,
They tell it all to the weary wife
That nods beside the fire.

Her hearth is wide to every wind
That makes the white ash spin;
And tide and tide and 'tween the tides
Her sons go out and in;

(Out with great mirth that do desire
Hazard of trackless ways,
In with content to wait their watch
And warm before the blaze);

And some return by failing light,
And some in waking dream,
For she hears the heels of the dripping ghosts
That ride the rough roof-beam.

Home, they come home from all the ports,
The living and the dead;
The good wife’s sons come home again
For her blessing on their head!

usna09mom · March 26, 2006, 6:16pm

Poet Brian Turner joined the Army in 1998, deployed with the 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum New York to Bosnia Herzegovina, and served there from 1999 to 2000. He spent 2004 in Iraq fighting as a soldier in the U.S. Army and bearing witness to war through poetry. AB Negative is from Here, Bullet, a collection of Turners poems.

“AB Negative” (The Surgeons Poem)

Thalia Fields is under a grey ceiling of clouds,
just under the turbulance, with anesthetics
dripping from an I.V. into her arm,
and the flight surgeon says The shrapnel
cauterized as it traveled through her
here, breaking this rib as it entered,
burning a hole through the left lung
to finish in her back, and all of this
she doesnt hear, except perhaps as music
that faraway music of peoples voices
when they speak gently and with care,
a comfort to her on a stretcher
in a flying hospital en route to Landstuhl,
just under the rain at midnight, and Thalia
drifts in and out of consciousness
as a nurse dabs her lips with a moist towel,
her palm on Thalias forehead, her vitals
slipping some, as burned flesh gives way
to the heat of the blood, the tunnels within
opening to fill her, just enough blood
to cough up and drown in, and Thalia,
she sees the shadows of people working
to save her, but she cannot feel their hands,
and she cannot hear them any longer,
and when she closes her eyes
the most beautiful colors rise in darkness,
tangerine washing into Russian blue,
with the droning engine humming on
in a dragonflys wings, the island palms
painting the sky an impossible hue
with their thick brushes dripping in green
But this is all an act of the imagination,
a means of dealing with the obscenity
of war, what loss there is, the inconsolable
grief, the fact that Thalia Fields is gone,
long gone, about as far from Mississippi
as she can get, 10,000 feet above Iraq
with a blanket draped over her body
and an exhausted surgeon in tears,
his bloodied hands on her chest, his head
sunk down, the nurse guiding him
to a nearby seat and holding him as he cries,
though no one hears it, because nothing can be heard
where pilots fly in black-out, the plane
like a shadow guiding the rain, here
in the droning engines of midnight.

usna09mom · April 2, 2006, 6:29pm

another poem by Brian Turner

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aortas opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what youve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrels cold esophagus, triggering
my tongues explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

usna09mom · April 2, 2006, 6:34pm

don’t miss the extraordinary three-part special report on the war in Iraq, “The Lifeline,” front-page of the Los Angeles Times. The story and flash photo gallery is breathtaking.

<a href=“http://latimes.com/[/url]”>http://latimes.com/</a>

usna09mom · April 9, 2006, 2:30pm

The third part of “The Lifeline” is currently on the front page of the Los Angeles Times home page:

<a href=“http://latimes.com/[/url]”>http://latimes.com/</a>

War Poetry

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