What Use Is Poetry, The Poet Is Asking

What Use Is Poetry, The Poet Is Asking by Rachel Tzvia Back

I

What use is poetry, the poet is asking

of the evening news

where the experts 

of military affairs have been assembled, 

the political analysts and politicians 

amassed, ex-generals

of measured pace and phrase all

called to the ideological front, 

the starched and uniformed delivered  

as fact, in lieu of truth, expert and 

ex-general of the demarcated 

worlds, barbed-wire words 

hurled across the room, the anchor 

confidently moored 

with her earnest nod-nodding of head

stating stately readiness 

for next round of certain warfare 

around the news table. 

              There were troops moving south

under rocket-lacerated skies, arced anger and 

armoured vehicles fully unarmed by fire,  

there were boys pulling other boys from 

the wreckage and flames, from the tunnels or into tunnels

beneath it all, an underworld amazed  

while whole buildings collapsed from above,

bombed complete to the ground, perfect aim at

entire worlds behind walls, all destroyed, until 

the buried alive and the buried dead the burned and the

broken are all one in the hearts darkest undertow so  

what use is poetry, the poet

wants to know.

II 

They whispered   peace   in the dark corridors, as though

it were a code.

With gun thrust into his arms first time, he saluted 

as trained, and shouted back  

I swear to uphold

but the soldier behind him in formation heard 

green gold 

from out of the fire’s eye and glow

in the rhythm of 

his marching boots.  

When the speakers blared   red alert red alert 

across the desert base, 

he saw the furred 

and antlered faces 

at the horizon, waiting 

in watchful patience.

In the barracks at night they listened for  

home    as one listens 

for bells that toll

only in foreign cities 

or for snow

falling on the already fallen

snow    in remotest hills 

in contented and constant

quietude.

III

The mother who sent her son

To war, allowed her son to go

To war, let the years unfold 

                                            until

Her son could not avoid going

To war –  

The mother 

Who didn’t stop her son 

From going

To war – 

Was called before the High Court 

Of mothers held on full moon nights 

At undisclosed Celestial sites, Stars of the Light 

Not yet evident on earth the only ones 

In attendance.

There they argued her case in silver-tinged

Syntax, crystalline intonations, verbed 

Asterisms composed wholly from the black holes 

Of her heart 

From when he first left, 

When he first called, when he 

Wept over the dark nightline as though

Distance from life’s imagined places to frontline 

Frenzy greater than to remotest planet in space, and 

Distance from the child’s home to flare-lit fear no more 

Than the tug of a unravelling

Cord.  

The mother who sent her son to war, didn’t

Stop her son from going to war,

Was found to be 

Guilty.

She, and the High Court, found her 

There where lost and forever

Guilty.

IV 

Meanwhile, hating Crete, and his long exile, filled with a desire 

to stand on his native soil, the father applied his thought to new 

invention, and altered the natural order of things. He laid down lines 

of feathers, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer 

ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. 

Then he fastened the feathers together with thread at the middle, 

and bees-wax at the base, then flexed each one into a gentle curve, 

so that they seemed like real bird’s wings. His son stood beside him, 

and not realising that he was handling what would be his peril, caught 

laughingly at the downy feathers that blew in the passing breeze, and 

softened the yellow bees-wax with his thumb, in his play hindering his 

father’s marvellous work. When last touches were put to what he had begun, 

the father balanced his own body between the two wings and hovered there

in the moving air.  He instructed the boy as well, laying down the rules

of flight, as he fitted the newly created wings on the boy’s shoulders. 

While he worked and issued his warnings, the ageing man’s cheeks 

were wet with tears, and his hands trembled. No heat or sun, no delight 

of blue borne flight.  He was carried aloft in the metal belly of 

the roaring beast, unleashed into the sky.  His arms were bare.  

His chest was weighted with vest and pack and gun. He rode the air 

until they landed in storming dust, into the bellowing battle. Even as 

his mouth cried his father’s name, he wrapped bandages around the wounded, 

staunched bleeding, placed morphine in ravaged mouths of pain. The sky was 

orphaned of birds; there were no feathers, not on land or waves.  Imagined 

wing-span of the fallen.

V

There were the tales being woven 

of others’ lives, long narratives

unfolding, crafted with devotion.

She had been told, “This is the contract 

you make: you agree to believe, 

you agree to care.”  But she 

was already otherwhere: what pretend 

could hold through despair.  Old

vows were now disavowed.  

Shelves weighted with books, second-hand

stores sought in strange cities, her

ceaseless travelling 

through storied worlds created 

as though just for her, for she had agreed 

to believe – 

That was over now.  

Henceforth the heart would disallow all tales

that weren’t true.

VI

He was only three years old. 

He was four and soon to turn five.

He already knew most of the letters. 

He was first born, devoted to the baby sister.

He was second born, always the younger brother.

He was killed in the evening at play in the street.

He was killed in the afternoon in the home’s shuttered 

peace.

The domed play tent, yellow and red, stood undisturbed  

also after.

In the photo, he is all little boy pride standing tall 

beside the colourful tower he’s built, slender and

so serious. 

In the photo, bundled in small denim coat, he 

sits by the sea, he is smiling, it must be a

first evening breeze.   

It was mortar fire. It was a missile.

It was or it wasn’t pre-emptive, was or wasn’t

retaliatory.  

The little-boy body wrapped in shrouds 

is now

the single certainty.  

                       (for Sahir Abu Namous and Daniel Tragerman, in memory)

VII

It was a sea of roaring lions, he 

had said, their soft white-padded feet 

are pawing at the wind. 

It was a sea of small feathered 

things, see how they spread

their light-boned wings 

not to take flight, she had offered, 

but for the simple delight 

of hovering on air, 

over water, then touching back

down on dark and quiet

waves.

It was a sea they hadn’t seen, it was

possessed, delineated green 

depths, death-silent

swimmers with explosives, barricaded

waves, grey vessels patrolling 

water and wind.

It was a sea of mortar fire fired – 

mistakenly, intentionally – it was

that sea, so 

what use 

is poetry

the poet keeps asking.