Category: Poets

Puff the Magic Dragon

A dragon lives forever
But not so little boys
Puff the Magic Dragon

When I was in Vietnam we called the AC-130, or an earlier version, "Puff the Magic Dragon" because it magically appeared at night when the enemy attacked, shooting out steady streams of flame, vanquishing our enemies.

I’m sure that the Vietnamese children had another name for it, just as I’m sure that the children of Afghanistan will soon have another, less loveable name for it.

Randall Jarrell understood the tragic attempts of children to make sense of a war that makes no sense.


Come to the Stone …
The child saw the bombers skate like stones across the fields
As he trudged down the ways the summer strewed
With its reluctant foliage; how many giants
Rose and peered down and vanished, by the road
The ants had littered with their crumbs and dead.
"That man is white and red like my clown doll,"
He says to his mother, who has gone away.
"I didn’t cry, I didn’t cry."
In the sky the planes are angry like the wind.
The people are punishing the people-why?
He answers easily, his foolish eyes
Brightening at that long simile, the world.
The angels sway above his story like balloons.
A child makes everything-except his death-a child’s.
Come to the stone and tell me why I died.

Randall Jarrell The Complete Poems

Thirty years after Vietnam, I still am startled awake by distant noises at night. Sometimes lately when I am startled to awareness, I lay awake and worry about those children in Afghanistan.I worry about those who will not make it through the night, who will "come to the stone."

Most of all, though, I worry about those who will live on. How will they answer the question, "The people are punishing the people-why?"

And what will that answer mean to my grandson and his generation?

Some of the media, primarily the alternative media, have begun to ask these questions, too. Two of the best are Save the Children and AlterNet — Living Up To My Beliefs — For My Children And The Children of Afghanistan.

However, the media as a whole seems obsessed with showing fuzzy green-and-white lightshows of our air raids or sterile overhead shots of targets surgically removed by our missiles and bombs, ignoring or denying that any people live down there where those bombs come skipping in like giant rocks thrown by some angry god.

Never Too Many Problems

LONG LIVE THE WEEDS
Hopkins

Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm!
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marred by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
The rough, the wicked, and the wild
That keep the spirit undefiled.
With these I match my little wit
And earn the right to stand or sit,
Hope, love, create, or drink and die:
These shape the creature that is I.

Theodore Roethke, Words for the Wind

I would like to think that we can learn something even from events as horrendous as the attack on the World Trade Center. Events like this test our strength and question who we are.

We must toil as individuals, and as a society, to come to terms with these “unholy”and “ugly” attacks on the World Trade Center.

In doing so, we truly define who we are and what we believe in ways that we never can when dealing with the ordinary, everyday events of our life.

Like most people, I’ve spent many hours talking about these events with friends and family. Sharing makes it easier to bear the pain of these events and helps to discover how I really do feel.

However, forcing yourself to express your ideas in print to strangers is another step in truly understanding your feelings and coming to terms with them.

Maybe that is why so many people are blogging now. They realize, as I have, that expressing their ideas publicly is the best way to discover who they are.

Channel Firing

I’ve loved Thomas Hardy since high school. Although I had always loved reading, his novels, particularly Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure, came as a revelation to me. Their brutal honesty and unsentimental analysis of the human condition amazed me, especially since much of the literature I had previously encountered in high school struck me as sentimental nonsense.

I wrote my first research paper on his works after reading all of his novels. I earned an “A” on that paper, no small feat from Mr. Thomas. And, perhaps for the first time, I thought of becoming an English major instead of a physics major in college.

Later, I grew to love his poetry more than his novels. Although his works seem to have gone out of style because they “lack style,” I still believe that they convey a truth through their simple language that is often lacking in more popular works. And, most of all, I look for truth in literature.

“Channel Firing” is a simple poem that needs no explanation, but it conveys truths about war that are as true now as they were when this poem was written:

THAT night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No”
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make
.
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christ’s sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening. . .

Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. ‘I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,’
Said one, ‘than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century !’

And many a skeleton shook his head.
Instead of preaching forty year,
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

The Winds of Autumn

The first big fall storm swept through our area today, canceling our usual Monday hike, and probably putting on hold any hikes for the rest of the week.

Perhaps if we hadn’t had such a long, beautiful hiking season we would have risked it today, but we would have been drenched.

Deprived of an actual hike in the mountains, I did the next best thing and read Burton Watson’s translation of Saigyo, Poems of a Mountain Home.

How similar all human emotions must be when an 11th Century Japanese poet can so perfectly state my feelings at this particular moment in time.

Even in a person

most times indifferent

to things around him

they waken feelings

the first winds of autumn

No need to state the feelings, to do so would be redundant.

Saigyo even seems to understand why I have been hiking with a particular passion the last three weeks.

Not stopping to mark the trail,

let me push even deeper

into the mountain!

Perhaps there’s a place

where bad news can never reach me!