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*Poem of the day thread

SHRAPNEL

1

Seven hundred tons per inch, I read, is the force in a bomb or shell in the
microsecond after its detonation,
and two thousand feet per second is the speed at which the shrapnel, the
materials with which the ordnance
is packed, plus its burst steel casing, “stretched, thinned, and sharpened”
by the tremendous heat and energy,
are propelled outwards in an arc until they strike an object and either ric-
ochet or become embedded in it.

In the case of insufficiently resistant materials, the shards of shrapnel can
cause “significant damage”;
in human tissue, for instance, rupturing flesh and blood vessels and shat-
tering and splintering bone.
Should no essential organs be involved, the trauma may be termed
“superficial,” as by the chief nurse,
a nun, in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, part of which takes place in a hospi-
tal receiving wounded from Dunkirk.

It’s what she says when a soldier cries, “Fuck!” as her apprentice, the
heroine, a young writer-to-be,
probes a wound with her forceps to extract one of many jagged fragments
of metal from a soldier’s legs.
“Fuck!” was not to be countenanced back then. “How dare you speak that
way?” scolds the imperious sister,
“your injuries are superficial, so consider yourself lucky and show some
courage worthy of your uniform.”

The man stays still after that, though “he sweated and… his knuckles
turned white round the iron bedhead.”
“Only seven to go,” the inexperienced nurse chirps, but the largest
chunk, which she’s saved for last, resists;
at one point it catches, protruding from the flesh – (“He bucked on the
bed and hissed through his teeth”) –
and not until her third resolute tug does the whole “gory, four-inch
stiletto of irregular steel” come clear.

2

“Shrapnel throughout the body” is how a ten-year-old killed in a recent
artillery offensive is described.
“Shrapnel throughout the body”: the phrase is repeated along with the
name of each deceased child
in the bulletin released as propaganda by our adversaries, at whose oper-
atives the barrage was directed.
There are photos as well – one shows a father rushing through the street,
his face torn with a last frantic hope,

his son in his arms, rag-limp, chest and abdomen speckled with deep,
dark gashes and smears of blood.
Propaganda’s function, of course, is exaggeration: the facts are there,
though, the child is there… or not there.
… As the shrapnel is no longer there in the leg of the soldier: the girl
holds it up for him to see, the man quips,
“Run him under the tap, Nurse, I’ll take him home,” then, “… he turned
to the pillow and began to sob.”

Technically, I read, what’s been called shrapnel here would have once
been defined as “splinters” or “fragments.”
“Shrapnel” referred then only to a spherical shell, names after its invent-
tor, Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel.
First used in 1804, it was “… guaranteed to cause heavy casualties… the
best mankiller the army possessed.”
Shrapnel was later awarded a generous stipend in recognition of his con-
tribution “to the start of the art.”

Where was I? The nun, the nurse; the nurse leaves the room, throws up;
the fictional soldier, the real child…
The father… What becomes of the father? He skids from the screen,
from the page, from the mind…
Shrapnel’s device was superseded by higher-powered, more efficient pro-
jectiles, obsolete now in their turn.
One war passes into the next. One wound is the next and the next. Some-
thing howls. Something cries.

C K Williams (2nd November 1936 – 20th September 2015)
from Wait (Bloodaxe, 2010)
 
Not the most subtle poem I've ever read, but:

​

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying​

By Noor Hindi

Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

(from 2020, so not a direct reaction to recent events)
 

stubborn ounces​

(To One Who Doubts the Worth of
Doing Anything If You Can’t Do Everything)
You say the Little efforts that I make
will do no good: they never will prevail
to tip the hovering scale
where Justice hangs in balance.
I don’t think I ever thought they would.
But I am prejudiced beyond debate
in favor of my right to choose which side
shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

Bonaro W Overstreet​

 
This Too Shall Pass

was no consolation to the woman
whose husband was strung out on opioids.

Gone to a better place: useless and suspect intel
for the couple at their daughter’s funeral

though there are better places to be
than a freezing church in February, standing

before a casket with a princess motif.
Some moments can’t be eased

and it’s no good offering clichés like stale
meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.

When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up
on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens

for a reason: more good tidings someone will try
to trepan your skull to insert. When fire

inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says
about seeing the rising moon. You want

an avalanche to bury you. You want to lie down
under a slab of snow, dumb as a jarred

sideshow embryo. What a circus.
The tents dismantled, the train moving on,

always moving, starting slow and gaining speed,
taking you where you never wanted to go.

--- Kim Addonizio

(from today's Poem-A-Day)
 
Diane di Prima, April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa



Today is your

birthday and I have tried

writing these things before,

but now

in the gathering madness, I want to

thank you

for telling me what to expect

for pulling

no punches, back there in that scrubbed Bronx parlor

thank you

for honestly weeping in time to

innumerable heartbreaking

italian operas for

pulling my hair when I

pulled the leaves off the trees so I'd

know how it feels, we are

involved in it now, revolution, up to our

knees and the tide is rising, I embrace

strangers on the street, filled with their love and

mine, the love you told us had to come or we

die, told them all in that Bronx park, me listening in

spring Bronx dusk, breathing stars, so glorious

to me your white hair, your height your fierce

blue eyes, rare among italians, I stood

a ways off, looking up at you, my grandpa

people listened to, I stand

a ways off listening as I pour out soup

young men with light in their faces

at my table, talking love, talking revolution

which is love, spelled backwards, how

you would love us all, would thunder your anarchist wisdom

at us, would thunder Dante, and Giordano Bruno, orderly men

bent to your ends, well I want you to know

we do it for you, and your ilk, for Carlo Tresca,

for Sacco and Vanzetti, without knowing

it, or thinking about it, as we do it for Aubrey Beardsley

Oscar Wilde (all street lights shall be purple), do it

for Trotsky and Shelley and big/dumb

Kropotkin

Eisenstein's Strike people, Jean Cocteau's ennui, we do it for

the stars over the Bronx

that they may look on earth

and not be ashamed.
 

We Who Are Your Closest Friends​


Phillip Lopate
we who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting
as a group
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift

your analyst is
in on it
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us

in announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves
but since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make
unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your
disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective
 

The Horses - Edwin Muir​

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
 
memo for labor


you cannot separate the job from the house from the rent from
the earth from the food from the healthcare from the water from
the transit from the war from the schools from the prisons from
the war from the water from the house from the healthcare from
the war from the transit from the schools from the food from the
job from the prisons from the rent from the earth


⁠—Ryan Eckes, from General Motors (2018)
 
Deconstruction

I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey,
for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible,
than the story of our own life, the one we do not
want to hear and will do anything to listen to.

Mary Ruefle
 
An old un but a good un from Hugh McMillan

Marked


Linn McGarr,
I am marking your exam in the bar.
It’s a highly unethical thing:
my own experience confirms
that ten pints can leave in tatters
the critical apparatus.

I have no choice, Linn McGarr.
I have taken on a thousand papers
so that myself and Jane
can go on our honeymoon to Spain.
I have to mark them constantly,
on the bus, at the toilet, in my sleep.
It is a hard and desperate life, Mc G,
I suspect you would concur with me.

And the pub is not so bad.
Summer stabs
through little slats of window,
corkscrews of dust glow,
dance in their spotlights,
rich gantry green and ambers ignite.
Are you in the sun, Linn McGarr?
Is it sparking concretes in Craigmillar?

I see, Linn McGarr,
you think Asquith was murdered
by Emily Pankhurst in 1903.
After another pint I am tempted to agree
(his later photographs show a corpse-like pallor)
and Trotsky, you say, overthrew Stalin.
Credit will always be given
to valid pieces of wishful thinking,

and your response to the Triple Entente,
“Who cares?” seems sublime, succinct,
though it’s not in the marking scheme,
and I like the way you dot the ‘I’ in Linn,
like a little bubble hovering in space,
above the mediocrity of name and place.

It is strange how fate has done us in.
If I had my way, Linn,
people like you and I would stride out
on the by-ways of history like giants.
Life has other plans for you, me too perhaps.
In the meantime, for what it’s worth, full marks.

Hugh McMillan
 
RIP John Burnside

Afterlife

When we are gone
our lives will continue without us

– or so we believe and,
at times, we have tried to imagine

the gaps we will leave being filled
with the brilliance of others:

someone else gathering plums
from this tree in the garden,

someone else thinking this thought
in a room filled with stars

and coming to no conclusion
other than this –

this bungled joy, this inarticulate
conviction that the future cannot come

without the grace
of setting things aside,

of giving up
the phantom of a soul

that only seemed to be
while it was passing.

Afterlife by John Burnside - Scottish Poetry Library

When we are gone / our lives will continue without us / / – or so we believe and, / at times, we have tried to imagine / / the...
www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk
 
Just scanned this in. A wee poem that appeared in the June 1955 Socialist Standard in the aftermath of the May 1955 General Election.

Spring Song after the Election (1955)

Another Election has come and gone.
The tumult’s ended, the shouting’s done.
Tweedledum’s lost, and Tweedledee’s won.
Loud sing cuckoo!
Lib., Lab., Con.,—and C.P. too,
Made up a right reformist crew,
Dispensing the usual vote-catching brew.
Loud sing cuckoo!
Liberal and Tory, C.P. and Lab.,
All full of promises, all full of gab.
Labour with ’Erbie, Tories with Rab,
Loud sing cuckoo!
Sugar and soft soap again the rule.
Kissing the babies, playing the fool,
Nice glossy photos to make the girls drool.
Loud sing cuckoo!
Candidates handsome, candidates plain,
Candidates pleasing with might and main,
All to keep capitalism running again.
Loud sing cuckoo!
All the old catchcries out once more,
Canvassers knocking at every front door,
First they’d been seen since the barney before,
Loud sing cuckoo!
Street-comer meetings, things of the past,
Democracy’s symbol’s a radio mast.
Now its the “ telly ’’—with all star cast.
Loud sing cuckoo!
Millions of workers put down their crosses,
Applauded the “gains,” regretted the “losses,”
Fine difference it made, they still work for bosses,
Loud sing cuckoo!
So the farcical game goes on.
Tweedledum’s lost and Tweedledee’s won.
Another Election has come and gone,
Loud sing cuckoo!

Stan Hampson
 
Transubstantiation
Susan Firer

Before rain hits the ground,
it’s water. It has no smell.
After it hits the ground, it’s
memories: my mother,
on crutches, moving toward me,
in rain, that last dry summer with her,
or a man, who later became my
husband, in a tent with me, in the
petrichor air, our bodies becoming
changelings, becoming a new house-
hold, becoming new gods, with
their own new myths. I was taught
that before the priest raises the host
and wine and says, “This is my body;
this is my blood,” and before the altar
girl rings the bells, the host is bread,
the wine is wine. After the words,
the host is God’s body; the wine is
God’s blood. Transubstantiation: me
after him, a baby sucking my nipple,
rain ribboning windows. Now
my six-year-old grandson, in the early
August rainy morning, piano-practices
“The Merry Widow Waltz.” Before
I was a widow, that song was
only a practice piece, a funny
opera. The rocks along my lake
are always most beautiful in rain.
In rain, their colors deepen and shine.
The smell after rain hits the ground
has a name: petrichor,
from the Greek words petra,
meaning stone, and ichor, which is
the fluid like blood in the veins of gods.
 
September Song

born 19.6.32—deported 24.9.42


Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.

As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made
an elegy for myself it
is true)

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.


Geoffrey Hill
 
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