Another Pacifist Poem

 Battle is Not Spectacle It’s a Catastrophe

 

‘Nor did anyone note with care that it was the same island; nor in the night did the Doliones clearly perceive that the heroes were returning; but they deemed that Pelasgian war-men of the Macrians had landed. Therefore they donned their armour and raised their hands against them. And with clashing of ashen spears and shields they fell on each other, like the swift rush of fire which falls on dry brushwood and rears its crest; and the din of battle, terrible and furious, fell upon the people of the Doliones.’

            (from The Argonautica Book 1, trans R. C. Seaton, 1912)

 

 

Blown back by the winds of our making,

they clash with enemies conjured

 

from darkness. Dawn will show bloody

truisms — neighbour slaying neighbour,

 

or people who might have been friends

slaughtering under orders. On the beaches

 

of their imaginations, the dead drift

through the tyrant’s dream — part smog,

 

part oil, part bloody earth, and the strange

intangible nature of torn flesh. War

 

laps at the cold waters of the summer

resorts. Weapons are made to be used.

 

The dying are heard in and around

the cities and people can only lament

 

while still living, streaming away or sheltering

in underground rail stations, masked

 

against the pandemic. The clash — rigor

mortis of empire-craving, and the media’s

 

feeding frenzy, networks embedding

to bring more than images to screens,

 

to frenzy around violence then regret

the cascading losses. And the news

 

that no epic poet could contrive to embellish

the story — the invading army has taken

 

Chernobyl, concrete cradle of unbirth,

monument to spectres that fall across borders,

 

called with impunity and reassurance,

summoned from its eternal sleeplessness,

 

full of self-praise as the reactor core

maintains its rage. And now its makers

 

have it back in their care. Sarcophagus.

Strategies of the exclusion zone. A tree

 

shivers, a bird is dead before it can land,

barely symbolic among seemingly

 

familiar terrain. Terrible. Fell. Furious.

 

 

            John Kinsella