The War Poem
War Poem
(intro)-following Ron Haviv.
And you felt their fingertips, like your own sweaty fingertips pressing against your palm-your hands bound-or hanging in the air full of women crying, of children crying, of men crying, as they pushed you to the ground amongst a gnarled and torn Cambodia. They wrapped something around your eyes, covering the sight of a boy dead with rivulets of blood around his legs, his torso, and pushed you, again, on your knees. The smoke and dust clawing at your nostrils, you prisoner, and there is a loud noise-you feel something-and fall to the ground. The burial is not a proper one and the jungle roots disintegrate your body, your skull full of dirt, nested with worms… And this is your story. This is the narrative you’ve worked some twenty-odd years on. Maybe there will be those who mourn for you. Maybe they too will be dead soon.
Let us… follow… Ron Haviv… conflict photojournalist.
There are two soldiers. (Black, grey) There are two soldiers and your hands are bound behind your back. They tell you, “say you’re a spy or we’ll kill you.” “Camera man!” You shout and they punch you…
People say, Haviv, you must be crazy to, by choice and will, repeatedly walk into the beast.
Panama, 1989. The dictator refused to give power when losing the election, and you took a picture… the elected Vice President fighting off paramilitary. Bullets flew everywhere… but then you
In Haiti they left bodies in the street to control the populace, bodies shot in the head or hacked with machetes. (Brown, Red) shot in the head and the people with amazing energy and color in Haiti, who were so optimistic electing a leader not in office, were now
Yugoslavia… old women dead in the streets. Children unmoved in the streets. And there are people living in the basements to hide from the bombings.
Republic of Russia, 1993. Communists in the white house, anti-Semitic and mean. And armies of ambiguous troop (which is which; who is who), (grey, white) (smoke) and thousands of communist protesters and more blood in the streets. Pipes thrown off bridges; weapons in the white house.
Operation Tiger Strike. A mosque takes down the Islamic flag and the Croatian flag rises. A kid ran. Shot in the back. (Pow.) (Chat.) (Pfpt.)
…so a man was lying there, dying in the street. A woman runs up to him to stop the bleeding and she is killed. (Pfpt. Pfpt. Pfpt.) and another woman runs out and is shot.
When the Serbs fight, they kill Muslims, frightening towns to leave. The march for peace, thousands, carrying the old Yugoslav flag, which all ethnicities lived. Snipers bite into the crowd from above. When the police arrest the gunmen, everyone was happy. They did not know what awaited them in the next three years.
Sarajevo.
Sarajevo.
Snipers everywhere.
And they wanted to drive the Muslims out.
Muslim concentration camps.
Thousands of mosques blown up.
Serbs let people in to see. And the world was saturated for 2-3 weeks.
And stopped caring. The Serbs knew… the world would become tired.
A child falls in the middle of the road and is run over by a tank. Soldiers laugh.
A child runs. Falls down in the middle of a road. A tank runs over the child. Soldiers are laughing.
A child. Falls. Road. Tank. Sees him. Run…over… soldiers. Laughing. Laughing.
A child falls in the middle of the road and is run over by a tank. Soldiers laugh.
Serbs killed many inhabitants of villages; Ron, the Serbs threatened you specifically, threatened to drink your blood if you came back.
A soldier finds his villages buried in his backyard.
Slaughter of Bosnian Muslims.
Europe let this happen. It was “too costly” to themselves to interfere.
You ask yourself, if these images got out… would anything stop?
The Serbs began realizing the power of the press and controlled photographs.
Southern Turkey, flight of the Kurds.
Huge movements of people, some carrying refrigerators on their backs.
Some crossing cold mountains. This is what they do to keep themselves and their family alive.
Carrying refrigerators on their back.
… in the “pool system” the military protects journalists but sanitizes the information. The lessons learned from Vietnam.
Somalia. Man-made famine.
Ron, there were bodies in the streets. By the afternoon there would be trucks full of bodies. The people were skeletons with flesh. This is how they die. The control of food was a war strategy to move populations. A famine thrown by warlords hungry for power.
Rwanda.
“1st Installment
You said you shook his hand, General, and it felt cold; you said his eyes were not human eyes. He became the personification of an evil, an evil resting in his African body, in the long gun latent on his fingers.
Massacre.
The French saw conflict burning within Rwandan borders, the certainty of murder, watched the armed militia fed with propaganda. It was time to leave. Board your helicopters as the U.N. sent its army personnel, their blue berets, to evacuate foreigners.
You had to restrain yourself to keep from puking. The accumulation of corpses created signature of their decay in the atmosphere. What was it about that atmosphere? You told us if a person killed another once, their atmosphere changed. “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two,” Plath reminds us. After that first slaughter, it seems like cattle, a sport. How quickly will she die? Did you decapitate in a single cut? Yes, I chopped his knees off , swoosh, like that. The atmosphere changes…
The Belgium had a colony there. Anthropologists descended onto the populations with instruments for measuring skulls, instruments for measuring hands. These were the same hands that pulled the trigger. These skulls would later display themselves on tables upon tables of skulls in a single large room. Yes, they formed racial identities and they favored one against another. One race, lighter skinned, more superior. The other inferior. Over the years they, too, believed the mythologies. There were riots. Violence emerged and no, the Belgium in shadows nodded approval. Tatter, shell, dwelling. Signs of an oncoming flood. Blood shower. Of course a few of their troops were murdered, which they blamed you for. As if that even needed attention in the amassing scream of Rwandan children.
one above another.
…
It is enough for one to approach the court of reason in the dark, wrists raised, and say “Take me. I surrender.”
Biblical scene you said.
You would pass a road with 500 people and when you went back 200 were dead…
When the Hutu lost power, many died of disease.
Three kilometers … churches with four hundred bodies… and another three kilometers another four hundred bodies. Again… again.
When you got back, Ron. There was nothing to say. No tales of bravery.
You saved lives. Brought people away, addressed wounds. Took out your camera and a man was not shot.
Bullets don’t click until you see dead bodies. They are so close… and so far (you are still alive.)
The Serbs caught you and threw you into a woodshed handcuffed. You continue based on how lucky you feel, Ron.
When you go home, Haviv. Everything seems fake. People complaining about stuff… hard to handle. You’re a misfit, unable to adjust to “normal” life. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
The names are different. Countries different. Same problem. Hate us. Hate them. Want this land. Want that land. Poisonous anger. Acceptance.
Norman Corwin once remarked… that yes we were fighting from freedom. But why did we have to fight and die every fifteen years for it.
This is the War Poem.
1st Draft.
There are men,
Who with a brushing gesture
Casts long plagues
Of coffins,
Who open the sky
To the cold rain named--.
War is a thick language,
Caught in every widow’s throat,
Like a dranged moth.
In every child’s throat
Like a warm fevor,
In every witness
A black tar sulking.
The creature of war
Is starving and decrepit,
Faceless and gre,
Blind. When called,
It spews
Hot gold, searing
On battle fields.
ii. odd there is suc ha thing..
that has made death simple.
Point it. Pull it,
And it spits fire,
And it bites bodies
Down. Tossing curses
Like a mad shaman.
Pull and you damn
Someone. Pull and
The breathing stops, and
A black hunger snatches
Twenty-four ears of visions,
Kicks a family in the chest,
Gnaws the night at the
Bar when he returned home,
The long car ride to
Oklahoma with Sarah,
The hot showers,
The strange dreams
Of shadows and sound.
Odd there is a thing, so full of rage,
That collects such
Years, and
Hides them in
The desert, in the jungle,
In the city streets.
Standard issue.
In the beginning,
Hunters would ask
The animal permission
To cut its flesh.
In this downpour,
Such traditions.
U.S. Soldier: May I have permission to take your flesh?
Iraqi Soldier: I cannot grant such a
plea.
U.S. Soldier:Such a sacrifice is needed
For the good of so many lives.
Iraqi Soldier: I did not know my life
Was so important, that it had such power.
The truth is whether we die here, or
Not, the war churns on,
Unscathed.
U.S. Soldier: Out death is not weighed of this world, but in the ocean of sacred symbology. I die for the right to live until the age of seventy-four, a vapid and droning life, to drive a BMW aimlessly for hours, to stare dull at computer sreens, drugged on plastic merchandise and free and endless stream of music, to sleep without volition, to hope to be exploited in new and exciting ways, to eat without need, to fill the endless drag with television, and digital idols, to worships dumbfounded in alcohol stained evenings, to live in the thick inertia, drowning in vats of loneliness, knowing no future, senseless and jumping in a cage of free-sample values. You die for an eternal sand castle, mouths hungry and dry, cities bombed, for throats thirsty. To ward off our conversion, our new God.
3. As we ask: what is it to
live?
A woman asks why her child’s
Corpse isn’t moving in her
Cradling arms.
As we hope to apply
Sugar intravenously,
They are force-fed
Warm metals.
As we await our nightly
Specials,
Our computer to reboot,
Our evening saturated with color
And insomnia,
The hold
Each other
Awaiting fury
From the sky,
As we ask how to live,
They ask when they die.
You can listen to Normin Corwin's On a Note of Triumph here. it may be worth your hour.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4668028
(intro)-following Ron Haviv.
And you felt their fingertips, like your own sweaty fingertips pressing against your palm-your hands bound-or hanging in the air full of women crying, of children crying, of men crying, as they pushed you to the ground amongst a gnarled and torn Cambodia. They wrapped something around your eyes, covering the sight of a boy dead with rivulets of blood around his legs, his torso, and pushed you, again, on your knees. The smoke and dust clawing at your nostrils, you prisoner, and there is a loud noise-you feel something-and fall to the ground. The burial is not a proper one and the jungle roots disintegrate your body, your skull full of dirt, nested with worms… And this is your story. This is the narrative you’ve worked some twenty-odd years on. Maybe there will be those who mourn for you. Maybe they too will be dead soon.
Let us… follow… Ron Haviv… conflict photojournalist.
There are two soldiers. (Black, grey) There are two soldiers and your hands are bound behind your back. They tell you, “say you’re a spy or we’ll kill you.” “Camera man!” You shout and they punch you…
People say, Haviv, you must be crazy to, by choice and will, repeatedly walk into the beast.
Panama, 1989. The dictator refused to give power when losing the election, and you took a picture… the elected Vice President fighting off paramilitary. Bullets flew everywhere… but then you
In Haiti they left bodies in the street to control the populace, bodies shot in the head or hacked with machetes. (Brown, Red) shot in the head and the people with amazing energy and color in Haiti, who were so optimistic electing a leader not in office, were now
Yugoslavia… old women dead in the streets. Children unmoved in the streets. And there are people living in the basements to hide from the bombings.
Republic of Russia, 1993. Communists in the white house, anti-Semitic and mean. And armies of ambiguous troop (which is which; who is who), (grey, white) (smoke) and thousands of communist protesters and more blood in the streets. Pipes thrown off bridges; weapons in the white house.
Operation Tiger Strike. A mosque takes down the Islamic flag and the Croatian flag rises. A kid ran. Shot in the back. (Pow.) (Chat.) (Pfpt.)
…so a man was lying there, dying in the street. A woman runs up to him to stop the bleeding and she is killed. (Pfpt. Pfpt. Pfpt.) and another woman runs out and is shot.
When the Serbs fight, they kill Muslims, frightening towns to leave. The march for peace, thousands, carrying the old Yugoslav flag, which all ethnicities lived. Snipers bite into the crowd from above. When the police arrest the gunmen, everyone was happy. They did not know what awaited them in the next three years.
Sarajevo.
Sarajevo.
Snipers everywhere.
And they wanted to drive the Muslims out.
Muslim concentration camps.
Thousands of mosques blown up.
Serbs let people in to see. And the world was saturated for 2-3 weeks.
And stopped caring. The Serbs knew… the world would become tired.
A child falls in the middle of the road and is run over by a tank. Soldiers laugh.
A child runs. Falls down in the middle of a road. A tank runs over the child. Soldiers are laughing.
A child. Falls. Road. Tank. Sees him. Run…over… soldiers. Laughing. Laughing.
A child falls in the middle of the road and is run over by a tank. Soldiers laugh.
Serbs killed many inhabitants of villages; Ron, the Serbs threatened you specifically, threatened to drink your blood if you came back.
A soldier finds his villages buried in his backyard.
Slaughter of Bosnian Muslims.
Europe let this happen. It was “too costly” to themselves to interfere.
You ask yourself, if these images got out… would anything stop?
The Serbs began realizing the power of the press and controlled photographs.
Southern Turkey, flight of the Kurds.
Huge movements of people, some carrying refrigerators on their backs.
Some crossing cold mountains. This is what they do to keep themselves and their family alive.
Carrying refrigerators on their back.
… in the “pool system” the military protects journalists but sanitizes the information. The lessons learned from Vietnam.
Somalia. Man-made famine.
Ron, there were bodies in the streets. By the afternoon there would be trucks full of bodies. The people were skeletons with flesh. This is how they die. The control of food was a war strategy to move populations. A famine thrown by warlords hungry for power.
Rwanda.
“1st Installment
You said you shook his hand, General, and it felt cold; you said his eyes were not human eyes. He became the personification of an evil, an evil resting in his African body, in the long gun latent on his fingers.
Massacre.
The French saw conflict burning within Rwandan borders, the certainty of murder, watched the armed militia fed with propaganda. It was time to leave. Board your helicopters as the U.N. sent its army personnel, their blue berets, to evacuate foreigners.
You had to restrain yourself to keep from puking. The accumulation of corpses created signature of their decay in the atmosphere. What was it about that atmosphere? You told us if a person killed another once, their atmosphere changed. “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two,” Plath reminds us. After that first slaughter, it seems like cattle, a sport. How quickly will she die? Did you decapitate in a single cut? Yes, I chopped his knees off , swoosh, like that. The atmosphere changes…
The Belgium had a colony there. Anthropologists descended onto the populations with instruments for measuring skulls, instruments for measuring hands. These were the same hands that pulled the trigger. These skulls would later display themselves on tables upon tables of skulls in a single large room. Yes, they formed racial identities and they favored one against another. One race, lighter skinned, more superior. The other inferior. Over the years they, too, believed the mythologies. There were riots. Violence emerged and no, the Belgium in shadows nodded approval. Tatter, shell, dwelling. Signs of an oncoming flood. Blood shower. Of course a few of their troops were murdered, which they blamed you for. As if that even needed attention in the amassing scream of Rwandan children.
one above another.
…
It is enough for one to approach the court of reason in the dark, wrists raised, and say “Take me. I surrender.”
Biblical scene you said.
You would pass a road with 500 people and when you went back 200 were dead…
When the Hutu lost power, many died of disease.
Three kilometers … churches with four hundred bodies… and another three kilometers another four hundred bodies. Again… again.
When you got back, Ron. There was nothing to say. No tales of bravery.
You saved lives. Brought people away, addressed wounds. Took out your camera and a man was not shot.
Bullets don’t click until you see dead bodies. They are so close… and so far (you are still alive.)
The Serbs caught you and threw you into a woodshed handcuffed. You continue based on how lucky you feel, Ron.
When you go home, Haviv. Everything seems fake. People complaining about stuff… hard to handle. You’re a misfit, unable to adjust to “normal” life. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
The names are different. Countries different. Same problem. Hate us. Hate them. Want this land. Want that land. Poisonous anger. Acceptance.
Norman Corwin once remarked… that yes we were fighting from freedom. But why did we have to fight and die every fifteen years for it.
This is the War Poem.
1st Draft.
There are men,
Who with a brushing gesture
Casts long plagues
Of coffins,
Who open the sky
To the cold rain named--.
War is a thick language,
Caught in every widow’s throat,
Like a dranged moth.
In every child’s throat
Like a warm fevor,
In every witness
A black tar sulking.
The creature of war
Is starving and decrepit,
Faceless and gre,
Blind. When called,
It spews
Hot gold, searing
On battle fields.
ii. odd there is suc ha thing..
that has made death simple.
Point it. Pull it,
And it spits fire,
And it bites bodies
Down. Tossing curses
Like a mad shaman.
Pull and you damn
Someone. Pull and
The breathing stops, and
A black hunger snatches
Twenty-four ears of visions,
Kicks a family in the chest,
Gnaws the night at the
Bar when he returned home,
The long car ride to
Oklahoma with Sarah,
The hot showers,
The strange dreams
Of shadows and sound.
Odd there is a thing, so full of rage,
That collects such
Years, and
Hides them in
The desert, in the jungle,
In the city streets.
Standard issue.
In the beginning,
Hunters would ask
The animal permission
To cut its flesh.
In this downpour,
Such traditions.
U.S. Soldier: May I have permission to take your flesh?
Iraqi Soldier: I cannot grant such a
plea.
U.S. Soldier:Such a sacrifice is needed
For the good of so many lives.
Iraqi Soldier: I did not know my life
Was so important, that it had such power.
The truth is whether we die here, or
Not, the war churns on,
Unscathed.
U.S. Soldier: Out death is not weighed of this world, but in the ocean of sacred symbology. I die for the right to live until the age of seventy-four, a vapid and droning life, to drive a BMW aimlessly for hours, to stare dull at computer sreens, drugged on plastic merchandise and free and endless stream of music, to sleep without volition, to hope to be exploited in new and exciting ways, to eat without need, to fill the endless drag with television, and digital idols, to worships dumbfounded in alcohol stained evenings, to live in the thick inertia, drowning in vats of loneliness, knowing no future, senseless and jumping in a cage of free-sample values. You die for an eternal sand castle, mouths hungry and dry, cities bombed, for throats thirsty. To ward off our conversion, our new God.
3. As we ask: what is it to
live?
A woman asks why her child’s
Corpse isn’t moving in her
Cradling arms.
As we hope to apply
Sugar intravenously,
They are force-fed
Warm metals.
As we await our nightly
Specials,
Our computer to reboot,
Our evening saturated with color
And insomnia,
The hold
Each other
Awaiting fury
From the sky,
As we ask how to live,
They ask when they die.
You can listen to Normin Corwin's On a Note of Triumph here. it may be worth your hour.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4668028