Authors: Tony Harrison
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
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
the black clouds all of us are under.
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:
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)
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 poured 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)
(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)
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
her pinafore full of ripe plums,
Victorias, with amber ooze
round their stalks, and says: Choose! Choose!
Now so much older, I,
more aware I’ve got to die,
use such ruses, I derive
from my mother, to survive.
Last week I saw here at the Met
a ‘Wheel of Life’ made in Tibet
where ‘Man Picking Fruit’ ’s used to depict,
in both the picker and the picked,
ultimate futility. Such dismal crap’ll
never spoil my mother’s apple.
Fuck philosophy that sees
life itself as some disease
we sicken with until released,
supervised by Pope or priest,
into a dry defruited zone
where no James Grieves were ever grown.
I’d barter nebulous Nirvanas
for carambolas or bananas.
I need to neologize to find
the fruit in futile humankind,
and
fruitility
is what I call
the fate which falls upon us all.
Meaningless our lives may be
but blessed with deep fruitility.
It could take pages if I list
all the joys of the fruitilitist:
retsina and grilled squid in Greece,
that death-bed cut-out of Matisse
I chanced on on a trip to Dallas,
Sempre libera
sung by Callas,
love-making in the afternoon,
the ripe papaya on this spoon
lingered over as my way
of starting on a fruitile day,
where 73rd and Broadway meet.
Even now the morning heat
brings the piss smells off the street,
Dobermann’s and man’s piss soars
as far as us, and we’re eight floors.
This breakfasting’s my Zensual ruse
to counteract such Broadway views
as those below, where homeless spread
the books and mags to earn their bread
and, after bread, if not before,
the rocks of crack some value more.
I read titles with my opera glasses:
Opera News and Chunky Asses,
Honcho, Ramrod, Newsweek, Time,
stiff from showers 2 a dime,
but, if like new, then 4 a dollar,
Bush, the Pope, the Ayatollah,
Noriega, Gorbachev,
and other ones with covers off,
a
danse macabre
, a
Vanitas
of big cheeses, and the chunky ass.
Diva-adoring gays peruse
the laid-out rows of
Opera News
.
Spectacles of temporal flux,
sidewalk piles of grubby books,
30 copies of one play
billed a great hit in its day,
and some still supposed to be
a dollar each, or 4 for 3.
And there’s a neighbour off to buy
the opera discs that help him die.
He’s young but shuffles with a cane
but will only use CDs for pain.
His father, who won’t meet him, mails
his sick son clothes from car-boot sales,
but Pa and Ma don’t realize
AIDS makes their son a smaller size.
They’ve never talked of death or sex
but occasionally Pa sends him cheques
to buy AZT, as AZT’s
one drug that slows down the disease.
I saw him in the lobby:
Hi
,
Pa sent me some more cash to buy
AZT,
but I bought these!
and showed me scores of new CDs.
My pa would think it such a waste