doubtful, in these dark days, what poems can do,
and watching the mists round Lindisfarne receding
my doubt extends to Dark Age Good Book too.
Eadfrith the Saxon scribe/illuminator
incorporated cormorants I’m seeing fly
round the same island thirteen centuries later
into the In principio’s initial I.
Billfrith’s begemmed and jewelled boards get looted
by raiders gung-ho for booty and berserk,
the sort of soldiery that’s still recruited
to do today’s dictators’ dirty work,
but the initials in St John and in St Mark
graced with local cormorants in ages,
we of a darker still keep calling Dark,
survive in those illuminated pages.
The word of God so beautifully scripted
by Eadfrith and Billfrith the anchorite
Pentagon conners have once again conscripted
to gloss the cross on the precision sight.
Candlepower, steady hand, gold leaf, a brush
were all that Eadfrith had to beautify
the word of God much bandied by George Bush
whose word illuminated midnight sky
and confused the Baghdad cock who was betrayed
by bombs into believing day was dawning
and crowed his heart out at the deadly raid
and didn’t live to greet the proper morning.
Now with noonday headlights in Kuwait
and the burial of the blackened in Baghdad
let them remember, all those who celebrate,
that their good news is someone else’s bad
or the light will never dawn on poor Mankind.
Is it open-armed at all that victory V,
that insular initial intertwined
with slack-necked cormorants from black laquered sea,
with trumpets bulled and bellicose and blowing
for what men claim as victories in their wars,
with the fire-hailing cock and all those crowing
who don’t yet smell the dunghill at their claws?
A Cold Coming
‘A cold coming we had of it.’
(T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’)
I saw the charred Iraqi lean
towards me from bomb-blasted screen,
his windscreen wiper like a pen
ready to write down thoughts for men,
his windscreen wiper like a quill
he’s reaching for to make his will.
I saw the charred Iraqi lean
like someone made of Plasticine
as though he’d stopped to ask the way
and this is what I heard him say:
‘Don’t be afraid I’ve picked on you
for this exclusive interview.
Isn’t it your sort of poet’s task
to find words for this frightening mask?
If that gadget that you’ve got records
words from such scorched vocal chords,
press RECORD before some dog
devours me mid-monologue.’
So I held the shaking microphone
closer to the crumbling bone:
‘I read the news of three wise men
who left their sperm in nitrogen,
three foes of ours, three wise Marines
with sample flasks and magazines,
three wise soldiers from Seattle
who banked their sperm before the battle.
Did No. 1 say: God be thanked
I’ve got my precious semen banked.
And No. 2: O Praise the Lord
my last best shot is safely stored.
And No. 3: Praise be to God
I left my wife my frozen wad?
So if their fate was to be gassed
at least they thought their name would last,
and though cold corpses in Kuwait
they could by proxy procreate.
Excuse a skull half roast, half bone
for using such a scornful tone.
It may seem out of all proportion
but I wish I’d taken their precaution.
They seemed the masters of their fate
with wisely jarred ejaculate.
Was it a propaganda coup
to make us think they’d cracked death too,
disinformation to defeat us
with no post-mortem millilitres?
Symbolic billions in reserve
made me, for one, lose heart and nerve.
On Saddam’s pay we can’t afford
to go and get our semen stored.
Sad to say that such high tech’s
uncommon here. We’re stuck with sex.
If you can conjure up and stretch
the image of me beside my wife,
closely clasped creating life …
(I let the unfleshed skull unfold
a story I’d been already told,
and idly tried to calculate
the content of ejaculate:
the sperm in one ejaculation
equals the whole Iraqi nation
times, roughly, let’s say, 12.5
though that .5’s not now alive.
Let’s say the sperms were an amount
so many times the body count,
2,500 times at least
(but let’s wait till the toll’s released!).
Whichever way Death seems outflanked
by one tube of cold bloblings banked.
Poor bloblings, maybe you’ve been blessed
with, of all fates possible, the best
according to Sophocles i.e.
‘the best of fates is not to be’
a philosophy that’s maybe bleak
for any but an ancient Greek
but difficult these days to escape
when spoken to by such a shape.
When you see men brought to such states
who wouldn’t want that ‘best of fates’
or in the world of Cruise and Scud
not go cryonic if he could,
spared the normal human doom
of having made it through the womb?)
He heard my thoughts and stopped the spool:
‘I never thought life futile, fool!
Though all Hell began to drop
I never wanted life to stop.
I was filled with such a yearning
to stay in life as I was burning,
such a longing to be beside
my wife in bed before I died,
and, most, to have engendered there
a child untouched by war’s despair.
So press RECORD! I want to reach
the warring nations with my speech.
Don’t look away! I know it’s hard
to keep regarding one so charred,
so disfigured by unfriendly fire
and think it once burned with desire.
Though fire has flayed off half my features
they once were like my fellow creatures’,
till some screen-gazing crop-haired boy
from Iowa or Illinois,
equipped by ingenious technophile
put paid to my paternal smile
and made the face you see today
an armature half-patched with clay,
an icon framed, a looking glass
for devotees of “kicking ass”,
a mirror that returns the gaze
of victors on their victory days
and in the end stares out the watcher
who ducks behind his headline: GOTCHA!
or behind the flag-bedecked page 1
of the true to bold-type-setting SUN!
I doubt victorious Greeks let Hector
join their feast as spoiling spectre,
and who’d want to sour the children’s joy
in Iowa or Illinois
&nb
sp; or ageing mothers overjoyed
to find their babies weren’t destroyed?
But cabs beflagged with SUN front pages
don’t help peace in future ages.
Stars and Stripes in sticky paws
may sow the seeds for future wars.
Each Union Jack the kids now wave
may lead them later to the grave.
But praise the Lord and raise the banner
(excuse a skull’s sarcastic manner!)
Desert Rat and Desert Stormer
without scars and (maybe) trauma,
the semen-bankers are all back
to sire their children in their sack.
With seed sown straight from the sower
dump second-hand spermatozoa!
Lie that you saw me and I smiled
to see the soldier hug his child.
Lie and pretend that I excuse
my bombing by B52s,
pretend I pardon and forgive
that they still do and I don’t live,
pretend they have the burnt man’s blessing
and then, maybe, I’m spared confessing
that only fire burnt out the shame
of things I’d done in Saddam’s name,
the deaths, the torture and the plunder
Say that I’m smiling and excuse
the Scuds we launched against the Jews.
Pretend I’ve got the imagination
to see the world beyond one nation.
That’s your job, poet, to pretend
I want my foe to be my friend.
It’s easier to find such words
for this dumb mask like baked dogturds.
So lie and say the charred man smiled
to see the soldier hug his child.
This gaping rictus once made glad
a few old hearts back in Baghdad,
hearts growing older by the minute
as each truck comes without me in it.
I’ve met you though, and had my say
which you’ve got taped. Now go away.’
I gazed at him and he gazed back
staring right through me to Iraq.
Facing the way the charred man faced
I saw the frozen phial of waste,
a test-tube frozen in the dark,
crib and Kaaba, sacred Ark,
a pilgrimage of Cross and Crescent
the chilled suspension of the Present.
Rainbows seven shades of black
curved from Kuwait back to Iraq,
and instead of gold the frozen crock’s
crammed with Mankind on the rocks,
the congealed geni who won’t thaw
until the World renounces War,
cold spunk meticulously jarred
never to be charrer or the charred,
a bottled Bethlehem of this come-
curdling Cruise/Scud-cursed millennium.
I went. I pressed rewind and play
and I heard the charred man say:
Three Poems from Bosnia
1. The Cycles of Donji Vakuf
We take Emerald to Bugojno, then the Opal route
to Donji Vakuf where Kalashnikovs still shoot
at retreating Serbs or at the sky
to drum up the leaden beat of victory.
Once more, though this time Serbian, homes
get pounded to façades like honeycombs.
This time it’s the Bosnian Muslims’ turn
to ‘cleanse’ a taken town, to loot, and burn.
Donji Vakuf fell last night at 11.
Victory’s signalled by firing rounds to Heaven
and for the god to whom their victory’s owed.
We see some victors cycling down the road
on bikes that they’re too big for. They feel so tall
as victors, all conveyances seem small,
but one, whose knees keep bumping on his chin,
rides a kid’s cycle, with a mandolin,
also childish size, strapped to the saddle,
jogging against him as he tries to pedal.
His machine gun and the mandolin impede
his furious pedalling, and slow down the speed
appropriate to victors, huge-limbed and big-booted,
and he’s defeated by the small bike that he’s looted.
The luckiest looters come down dragging cattle,
two and three apiece they’ve won in battle.
A goat whose udder seems about to burst
squirts her milk to quench a victor’s thirst
which others quench with a shared beer, as a cow,
who’s no idea she’s a Muslim’s now,
sprays a triumphal arch of piss across
the path of her new happy Bosnian boss.
Another struggles with stuffed rucksack, gun, and bike,
small and red, he knows his kid will like,
and he hands me his Kalashnikov to hold
to free his hands. Rain makes it wet and cold.
When he’s balanced his booty, he makes off,
for a moment forgetting his Kalashnikov,
which he slings with all his looted load
on to his shoulder, and trudges down the road
where a solitary reaper passes by,
scythe on his shoulder, wanting fields to dry,
hoping, listening to the thunder, that the day
will brighten up enough to cut his hay.
And tonight some small boy will be glad
he’s got the present of a bike from soldier dad,
who braved the Serb artillery and fire
to bring back a scuffed red bike with one flat tyre.
And among the thousands fleeing north, another
with all his gladness gutted, with his mother,
knowing the nightmare they are cycling in,
will miss the music of his mandolin.
(Donji Vakuf, 14 September 1995)
2. The Bright Lights of Sarajevo
After the hours that Sarajevans pass
queuing with empty canisters of gas
to get the refills they wheel home in prams,
or queuing for the precious meagre grams
of bread they’re rationed to each day,
and often dodging snipers on the way,
or struggling up sometimes eleven flights
of stairs with water, then you’d think that the nights
of Sarajevo would be totally devoid
of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed,
but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case –
The young go walking at a stroller’s pace,
black shapes impossible to mark
as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark.
In unlit streets you can’t distinguish who
calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh.
All take the evening air with stroller’s stride,
no torches guide them but they don’t collide
except as one of the flirtatious ploys
when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by some boy’s.
Then the tender radar of the tone of voice
shows by its signals she approves his choice.
Then match or lighter to a cigarette
to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.
And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed
beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test
and he’s about, I think, to take her hand
and lead her away from where they stand
on two shell splash scars, where in ’92
Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue
and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread
lay on the pavement with the broken dead.
And at their feet in holes made by the mortar
that caused the massacre, now full of water
from the rain that’s poure
d down half the day,
though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away,
leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky
ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye,
in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees
fragments of the splintered Pleiades,
sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells
splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells.
The dark boy shape leads dark girl shape away
to share one coffee in a candlelit café
until the curfew, and he holds her hand
behind AID flour sacks refilled with sand.
(Sarajevo, 20 September 1995)
3. Essentials
(Conversation with a Croat)
‘I looked at my Shakespeares and said NO!
I looked at my Sartres, which I often read
by candlelight, and couldn’t let them go
even at this time of direst need.
Because he was a Fascist like our Chetnik foes
I lingered for a while at my Célines …
but he’s such a serious stylist, so I chose
Das Kapital to cook my AID canned beans!’
(Sarajevo, 20 September 1995)
Fruitility
What a glorious gift from Gaia
raspberries piled on papaya,
which as a ruse to lift my soul
I serve up in my breakfast bowl,
and, contemplating, celebrate
nature’s fruit, and man’s air-freight
speeding my fruit breakfast here
through tropo- and through stratosphere.
I praise papaya and celebrate
the man who packed it in its crate,
the worker or Hawaiian grower
in Kipahula or Pahoa,
the worried cultivator who
scans the sky from Honomu,
with global warming getting higher
than is good for his papaya;
worries I myself had known
when, in Nigeria, I’d grown
what we called pawpaws of my own;
picked, deseeded, served fridge-fresh
I fed my kids their orange flesh.
I gave my kids fruit to repeat
the way I once got fruit to eat,
not so exotic but the start
of all my wonder and my art.
My mother taught me to adore
the fruit she scrounged us in the War,
scarce, and marred with pock and wart
nonetheless the fruit she brought
taught me, very young, to savour
the gift of fruit, its flesh and flavour.
Adoring apples I’ve linked Eve’s
with my mother’s ripe James Grieves
no God could ever sour with sin
or jinx the juice all down my chin.
Still in my dreams my mother comes