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
