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POETRY FOR THE TIMES |
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Artists for Peace, Civil Liberties and Justice
Australian Poets Against the War
THINGS YOU CAN DO NOW: Take a few minutes to read from sources on this page. Read poem(s) to others in your own setting (and let us know) Send recommendations of poems to be posted on this page.
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It Should Break Your Heart
to Kill
---Brian Turner Let America be America again Let America be America again.
On
the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester
Fairfax,
whose name in arms through Europe rings
Filling
each mouth with envy, or with praise,
And
all her jealous monarchs with amaze
And
rumours loud, that daunt remotest kings;
Thy
firm unshak'n virtue ever brings
Victory
home, though new rebellions raise
Their
hydra heads, and the false north displays
Her
brok'n league, to imp their serpent wings:
O
yet a nobler task awaits thy hand;
For
what can war but endless war still breed?
Till
Truth and Right from Violence be freed,
And
Public Faith clear'd from the shameful brand
Of
Public Fraud. In vain doth Valour bleed
While Avarice and Rapine share the land.
--- John
Milton (with shameless emphasis by a webmaster)
444 Written in the pages at the end of a copy of a book containing Mark Twains War Prayer. While I am rocking you my son, And singing lullabies, Someone is building stouter planes For death to ride the skies, While I am dressing you, my son In little boyish suits, Someone is making uniforms And sturdy soldier boots, While you are chasing Butterflies Amid the tangled grass, Someone is testing chemicals To make a deadlier gas. And while you eat your simple fare Perhaps the war lords sit, To start again the bugle Not(e)s That only call the fit. While I would build a splendid man So fine and strong, my son, Someone, in secret, tries to make A farther reaching gun. A gun that on some distant Day, When drums of battle Roll, May leave me with a Golden Star And iron in my soul. ----Lucy Brice (unpublished) They
The
Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
'We're
none of us the same!' the boys reply.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars
under sacks,
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An
ecstasy of fumbling,
In all my dreams, before my
helpless sight,
If in some smothering dreams
you too could pace ---Wilfred
Owen |
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The
Shield of Achilles She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, Marble well-governed cities And ships upon untamed seas, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead. A plain without a feature, bare and brown, No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood, Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood An unintelligible multitude, A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign. Out of the air a voice without a face Proved by statistics that some cause was just In tones as dry and level as the place: No one was cheered and nothing was discussed; Column by column in a cloud of dust They marched away enduring a belief Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief. She looked over his shoulder For ritual pieties, White flower-garlanded heifers, Libation and sacrifice, But there on the shining metal Where the altar should have been, She saw by his flickering forge-light Quite another scene. Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke) And sentries sweated for the day was hot: A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground. The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes like to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died. She looked over his shoulder For athletes at their games, Men and women in a dance Moving their sweet limbs Quick, quick, to music, But there on the shining shield His hands had set no dancing-floor But a weed-choked field. A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, Loitered about that vacancy; a bird Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were kept, Or one could weep because another wept. The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away, Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Who would not live long.
---W.H. Auden i sing of Olaf glad and big i sing of Olaf glad and big whose warmest heart recoiled at war: a conscientious object-or his wellbelov'd colonel(trig westpointer most succinctly bred) took erring Olaf soon in hand; but--though an host of overjoyed noncoms(first knocking on the head him)do through icy waters roll that helplessness which others stroke with brushes recently employed anent this muddy toiletbowl, while kindred intellects evoke allegiance per blunt instruments-- Olaf(being to all intents a corpse and wanting any rag upon what God unto him gave) responds,without getting annoyed "I will not kiss your fucking flag"
straightway the silver bird looked grave (departing hurriedly to shave)
but--though all kinds of officers (a yearning nation's blueeyed pride) their passive prey did kick and curse until for wear their clarion voices and boots were much the worse, and egged the firstclassprivates on his rectum wickedly to tease by means of skilfully applied bayonets roasted hot with heat-- Olaf(upon what were once knees) does almost ceaselessly repeat "there is some shit I will not eat"
our president,being of which assertions duly notified threw the yellowsonofabitch into a dungeon,where he died
Christ(of His mercy infinite) i pray to see;and Olaf,too preponderatingly because unless statistics lie he was more brave than me:more blond than you. How to Kill On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam
---Hayden Carruth, from Alicia Ostriker, ed.,
Poems for the Time: an anthology. (from
www.mobylives.com)
He says, "You've never
seen anything
And I said, long after that
night, after I'd felt their
---Dale
Ritterbusch, in Viet
Nam Generation Journal Online
The Prison Cell
Just This Once President Bush, before you order airstrikes imagine the first cruise missile as a direct hit on your closest friend.
That might be Laura. Then twenty-five other family and friends. There are no survivors. Now imagine some
other way to do it. Quadruple the inspectors. Put a thousand and one U.N. people in. Then call for peace activists
to volunteer to go to Iraq for two weeks each. Flood that country with well-meaning tourists, people curious about
the land that produced the great saints, Gilani, Hallaj, and Rabia. Set up hostels near those tombs. Encourage peace
people to spend a bunch of money in shops, to bring rugs home and samovars by the bushel. Send an Arabic translator with
every four activists. The U.S. Government will pay for the translators and for building and staffing the hostels, one hostel for
every twenty visitors and five translators. Central air and heat are state of the art, and the hostels belong to the Iraqis at the end
of this experiment. Pilgrims with carpentry skills will add studios, porches, armadas, meditation cribs on the roof, clerestories,
and lots of subtle color. Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandala, and my friend, Johathan Granoff at the U.N. will be the core
organizational team. Abdul Aziz Said too has got to be in on this, who grew up in a Bedouin tent four hundred miles
east of Damascus. He didn’t see a table until he was fourteen! Shamans from various traditions, Martin Prechtal, Bly,
and many powerful women, Sima Samar, Shirley, surely. I offer these exalted expertises without having asked
anyone. No one knows what might come of such potlatch, potluck. Maybe nothing, or maybe it would show some Iraqis
and some of the world that we really do not wish to kill anybody and that we truly are not out to appropriate oil reserves.
We’re working on building a hydrogen vehicle as fast as we can, aren’t we? Put no limit on the number of activists from all
over that might want to hang out and explore Iraq for two weeks. Is anything left of Babylon? There could be informal courses
for college credit and pickup soccer games every evening at five. Long leisurely late suppers. Chefs will come for cookouts.
The U.S. government furnishes air transportation, that is, hires airliners from the country of origin and back for each peace tourist,
who must carry and spend the equivalent of $1001 US inside Iraq. Keep part of the invasion force nearby as police, but let those
who claim to deeply detest war try something else just this once, for one year. Call our bluff. If this madman Saddam’s WMD threat
is not, somehow, eliminated by next February, you can go in with special ops and do it that way. Medical services, transportation
inside Iraq, along with many other ideas that will be thought of later during the course of this innocently, blatantly,
foolish project will all also be funded by the U.S. government. But what if terrible, unforeseen disaster rains down
because of the spontaneous, unthought-out hippie notion? One never knows. Surely it wouldn’t be worse than
the shock and awe display we have planned for the first forty-eight hours. But we must always suspect intentionally
“good” deeds. Consider this more of a lark. A skylark. Look. There’s a practice known as sama, a deep listening
to poetry and music, with sometimes movement involved. Unpremeditated ease. We could experiment with whole nights
of that, staying up until dawn, sleeping in tents during the day. Good musicians will be lured with modest fees: cellos,
banjoes, oboes, ouds, and French horns. Hundreds of harmonicae and the entire University of North Carolina undergraduate gospel
choir. Thus instead of war there’s much relaxed, improvisational festivity from March 2003 through February 2004. It could be
As though war had already happened, as it has. Now we’re in the giddy, Brokenopen aftertime. So let slip the pastel
minivans of peace and whoa be they who cry surcease! I’ll be first to sign up for two weeks of wandering winter
desert reading Hallaj, Abdul Qadir Gilani, dear Rabia, and Scherazade’s life-prolonging thousand and one Arabian Nights.
I am Coleman Barks, retired English professor, ee-meritus, living in Athens, Georgia, and I don’t really consider this proposal
foolish. Just hopeful for the bunch I come along with, those born from the mid-1920’s until the mid-1940’s,
that before we die or lose our luck and energy, we might help push away from terrorism and cruise-missile terrorism
and the video-techno-laser, loveless, unerotic- idiotic, bio-chemo atom- toys. Nossir, ain’t gone study war no more.
Never denying we have the tendencies built-in, a cold murderous aggression, the who-cares-it’s-all-bullshit-anyway turning
from those so obviously in pain. March 19, 2003, and I’m not quite yet weary enough of words not to try
to say the taste of this failure we sponsor with our tax dollars. But after the stupidity starts I might be. ---Coleman Barks, reading Your favorite anti-war or peace poem here. LINKS
Poets
Against The War Anthologies from around the world War Poems and Manuscripts---Wilfred Owen 60's Project Bookstore: Vietnam Era Antiwar Literature including Poetry. Against Forgetting, Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (Edited by Carolyn Forché) "the rest is silence" Lost Poets of the Great War; Wilfred Owen Digital Archive A Peace Pledge Union Project---20th Century Poetry and War Representative Poets Online---A project of the English Department, University of Toronto |