#24, December 10, 2003

Traversing Clio (7)

Beyond Poetry

At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was possible for a poet like Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon to write poetry that would be searing, that would grab the reader, make her sit up in her chair, and really feel, as if for the first time, the pain, the anguish, the needless suffering, the stupidity of war.

But words no longer suffice. At the beginning of the new century, it has all been heard and seen before. Sometimes an event will be so horrific that it will reach people’s attention, but this will just be one act in a continuing stream that is the barbarity of peace and “normalcy.”

When it comes to war, no stories, no poems, will any longer provoke an audience. Even the words of the Vietnam generation seem to have become muted, the world has moved on. All the anti-war poems that can be read throughout the United States will not stir a single politician’s conscience.

So when nine children on one day, and six children on another day, are killed by American troops in Search and Destroy missions against the Taliban, who will take up the pen, or reach for the keyboard, to create a poem in memory of the lost children? No one. The words would just sound like clichés, or they might even be maudlin in the face of so much death and destruction; perhaps they would appropriate the lives of the children for political purposes, or, whatever they tried to do, give the deaths a meaning that the utter futility of their foreshortened lives would deny.

You cannot write a poem

For children

Who have been killed

In Afghanistan

Where?

In Afghanistan

To safeguard

American values.

It cannot

It should not

It Will not

BE DONE