Two Poems for the Surge
February 28th, 2007 by Doug Schnitzspahn
one for honesty…
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By Randall Jarrell
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
one for what we can do…
Try to Praise the Mutilated World
By Adam Zagajewski
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Translated by Renata Gorczynski
Both, I think, call for compassion in a world where we are far too willling to do harm. In all the current world dialogue, there are very few who call for compassion. Where is the world leader who will offer reconciliation?
The other day I was working in a cafe and saw a girl sitting across from me put her hands up to her eyes. She was crying. What could I do? Smile? Say something? Would that truly have been appropriate? I thought about buying her a chocolate and asking the barista to bring it to her anonymously. I never did it. Instead, I left and she haunted me. If I had made some effort, would it truly have been compassion or fulfillling some need of my own to do good? What was it that Byron said after he watched three criminals being executed in Campo dei Fiore? “I would have saved them if I could.”
Doesn’t Jarrell show greater compassion for the ball-turret gunner with that last, brutally honest line than he ever could have with some proclamation of his own sadness?
I was lucky enough to interview Terry Tempest Williams in December. I was the first writer outside of her immediate circle with whom she discussed her upsoming book Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World. It recounts her experiences working in still-ravaged Rwanda (alongside stories about Byzantine mosaics and prairie dogs) and trying to find a way to piece together this fragemented world. Immediately, I thought of Zagajewski’s poem, how this simple attention to beauty and compassion is all we can do.
Near the end of our talk, Terry posed the question “What are we in the service of?” I’m still trying to answer.
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