Selected Poems (22 page)

put paid to my paternal smile

and made the face you see today

an armature half-patched with clay,

an icon framed, a looking glass

for devotees of “kicking ass”,

a mirror that returns the gaze

of victors on their victory days

and in the end stares out the watcher

who ducks behind his headline: GOTCHA!

or behind the flag-bedecked page 1

of the true to bold-type-setting SUN!

I doubt victorious Greeks let Hector

join their feast as spoiling spectre,

and who’d want to sour the children’s joy

in Iowa or Illinois

or ageing mothers overjoyed

to find their babies weren’t destroyed?

But cabs beflagged with SUN front pages

don’t help peace in future ages.

Stars and Stripes in sticky paws

may sow the seeds for future wars.

Each Union Jack the kids now wave

may lead them later to the grave.

But praise the Lord and raise the banner

(excuse a skull’s sarcastic manner!)

Desert Rat and Desert Stormer

without scars and (maybe) trauma,

the semen-bankers are all back

to sire their children in their sack.

With seed sown straight from the sower

dump second-hand spermatozoa!

Lie that you saw me and I smiled

to see the soldier hug his child.

Lie and pretend that I excuse

my bombing by B52s,

pretend I pardon and forgive

that they still do and I don’t live,

pretend they have the burnt man’s blessing

and then, maybe, I’m spared confessing

that only fire burnt out the shame

of things I’d done in Saddam’s name,

the deaths, the torture and the plunder

the black clouds all of us are under.

Say that I’m smiling and excuse

the Scuds we launched against the Jews.

Pretend I’ve got the imagination

to see the world beyond one nation.

That’s your job, poet, to pretend

I want my foe to be my friend.

It’s easier to find such words

for this dumb mask like baked dogturds.

So lie and say the charred man smiled

to see the soldier hug his child.

This gaping rictus once made glad

a few old hearts back in Baghdad,

hearts growing older by the minute

as each truck comes without me in it.

I’ve met you though, and had my say

which you’ve got taped. Now go away.’

I gazed at him and he gazed back

staring right through me to Iraq.

Facing the way the charred man faced

I saw the frozen phial of waste,

a test-tube frozen in the dark,

crib and Kaaba, sacred Ark,

a pilgrimage of Cross and Crescent

the chilled suspension of the Present.

Rainbows seven shades of black

curved from Kuwait back to Iraq,

and instead of gold the frozen crock’s

crammed with Mankind on the rocks,

the congealed geni who won’t thaw

until the World renounces War,

cold spunk meticulously jarred

never to be charrer or the charred,

a bottled Bethlehem of this come-

curdling Cruise/Scud-cursed millennium.

I went. I pressed rewind and
play

and I heard the charred man say:

We take
Emerald
to Bugojno, then the
Opal
route

to Donji Vakuf where Kalashnikovs still shoot

at retreating Serbs or at the sky

to drum up the leaden beat of victory.

Once more, though this time Serbian, homes

get pounded to façades like honeycombs.

This time it’s the Bosnian Muslims’ turn

to ‘cleanse’ a taken town, to loot, and burn.

Donji Vakuf fell last night at 11.

Victory’s signalled by firing rounds to Heaven

and for the god to whom their victory’s owed.

We see some victors cycling down the road

on bikes that they’re too big for. They feel so tall

as victors, all conveyances seem small,

but one, whose knees keep bumping on his chin,

rides a kid’s cycle, with a mandolin,

also childish size, strapped to the saddle,

jogging against him as he tries to pedal.

His machine gun and the mandolin impede

his furious pedalling, and slow down the speed

appropriate to victors, huge-limbed and big-booted,

and he’s defeated by the small bike that he’s looted.

The luckiest looters come down dragging cattle,

two and three apiece they’ve won in battle.

A goat whose udder seems about to burst

squirts her milk to quench a victor’s thirst

which others quench with a shared beer, as a cow,

who’s no idea she’s a Muslim’s now,

sprays a triumphal arch of piss across

the path of her new happy Bosnian boss.

Another struggles with stuffed rucksack, gun, and bike,

small and red, he knows his kid will like,

and he hands me his Kalashnikov to hold

to free his hands. Rain makes it wet and cold.

When he’s balanced his booty, he makes off,

for a moment forgetting his Kalashnikov,

which he slings with all his looted load

on to his shoulder, and trudges down the road

where a solitary reaper passes by,

scythe on his shoulder, wanting fields to dry,

hoping, listening to the thunder, that the day

will brighten up enough to cut his hay.

And tonight some small boy will be glad

he’s got the present of a bike from soldier dad,

who braved the Serb artillery and fire

to bring back a scuffed red bike with one flat tyre.

And among the thousands fleeing north, another

with all his gladness gutted, with his mother,

knowing the nightmare they are cycling in,

will miss the music of his mandolin.

(Donji Vakuf, 14 September 1995)

After the hours that Sarajevans pass

queuing with empty canisters of gas

to get the refills they wheel home in prams,

or queuing for the precious meagre grams

of bread they’re rationed to each day,

and often dodging snipers on the way,

or struggling up sometimes eleven flights

of stairs with water, then you’d think that the nights

of Sarajevo would be totally devoid

of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed,

but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case –

The young go walking at a stroller’s pace,

black shapes impossible to mark

as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark.

In unlit streets you can’t distinguish who

calls bread
hjleb
or
hleb
or calls it
kruh
.

All take the evening air with stroller’s stride,

no torches guide them but they don’t collide

except as one of the flirtatious ploys

when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by some boy’s.

Then the tender radar of the tone of voice

shows by its signals she approves his choice.

Then match or lighter to a cigarette

to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.

And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed

beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test

and he’s about, I think, to take her hand

and lead her away from where they stand

on two shell splash scars, where in ’92

Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue

and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread

lay on the pavement with the broken dead.

And at their feet in holes made by the mortar

that caused the massacre, now full of water

from the rain that’s poured down half the day,

though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away,

leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky

ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye,

in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees

fragments of the splintered Pleiades,

sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells

splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells.

The dark boy shape leads dark girl shape away

to share one coffee in a candlelit café

until the curfew, and he holds her hand

behind AID flour sacks refilled with sand.

(Sarajevo, 20 September 1995)

(Conversation with a Croat)

‘I looked at my Shakespeares and said NO!

I looked at my Sartres, which I often read

by candlelight, and couldn’t let them go

even at this time of direst need.

Because he was a Fascist like our
Chetnik
foes

I lingered for a while at my Célines …

but he’s such a serious stylist, so I chose

Das Kapital
to cook my AID canned beans!’

(Sarajevo, 20 September 1995)

What a glorious gift from Gaia

raspberries piled on papaya,

which as a ruse to lift my soul

I serve up in my breakfast bowl,

and, contemplating, celebrate

nature’s fruit, and man’s air-freight

speeding my fruit breakfast here

through tropo- and through stratosphere.

I praise papaya and celebrate

the man who packed it in its crate,

the worker or Hawaiian grower

in Kipahula or Pahoa,

the worried cultivator who

scans the sky from Honomu,

with global warming getting higher

than is good for his papaya;

worries I myself had known

when, in Nigeria, I’d grown

what we called pawpaws of my own;

picked, deseeded, served fridge-fresh

I fed my kids their orange flesh.

I gave my kids fruit to repeat

the way I once got fruit to eat,

not so exotic but the start

of all my wonder and my art.

My mother taught me to adore

the fruit she scrounged us in the War,

scarce, and marred with pock and wart

nonetheless the fruit she brought

taught me, very young, to savour

the gift of fruit, its flesh and flavour.

Adoring apples I’ve linked Eve’s

with my mother’s ripe James Grieves

no God could ever sour with sin

or jinx the juice all down my chin.

Still in my dreams my mother comes

her pinafore full of ripe plums,

Victorias, with amber ooze

round their stalks, and says: Choose! Choose!

Now so much older, I,

more aware I’ve got to die,

use such ruses, I derive

from my mother, to survive.

Last week I saw here at the Met

a ‘Wheel of Life’ made in Tibet

where ‘Man Picking Fruit’ ’s used to depict,

in both the picker and the picked,

ultimate futility. Such dismal crap’ll

never spoil my mother’s apple.

Fuck philosophy that sees

life itself as some disease

we sicken with until released,

supervised by Pope or priest,

into a dry defruited zone

where no James Grieves were ever grown.

I’d barter nebulous Nirvanas

for carambolas or bananas.

I need to neologize to find

the fruit in futile humankind,

and
fruitility
is what I call

the fate which falls upon us all.

Meaningless our lives may be

but blessed with deep fruitility.

It could take pages if I list

all the joys of the fruitilitist:

retsina and grilled squid in Greece,

that death-bed cut-out of Matisse

I chanced on on a trip to Dallas,

Sempre libera
sung by Callas,

love-making in the afternoon,

the ripe papaya on this spoon

lingered over as my way

of starting on a fruitile day,

where 73rd and Broadway meet.

Even now the morning heat

brings the piss smells off the street,

Dobermann’s and man’s piss soars

as far as us, and we’re eight floors.

This breakfasting’s my Zensual ruse

to counteract such Broadway views

as those below, where homeless spread

the books and mags to earn their bread

and, after bread, if not before,

the rocks of crack some value more.

I read titles with my opera glasses:

Opera News and Chunky Asses,

Honcho, Ramrod, Newsweek, Time,

stiff from showers 2 a dime,

but, if like new, then 4 a dollar,

Bush, the Pope, the Ayatollah,

Noriega, Gorbachev,

and other ones with covers off,

a
danse macabre
, a
Vanitas

of big cheeses, and the chunky ass.

Diva-adoring gays peruse

the laid-out rows of
Opera News
.

Spectacles of temporal flux,

sidewalk piles of grubby books,

30 copies of one play

billed a great hit in its day,

and some still supposed to be

a dollar each, or 4 for 3.

And there’s a neighbour off to buy

the opera discs that help him die.

He’s young but shuffles with a cane

but will only use CDs for pain.

His father, who won’t meet him, mails

his sick son clothes from car-boot sales,

but Pa and Ma don’t realize

AIDS makes their son a smaller size.

They’ve never talked of death or sex

but occasionally Pa sends him cheques

to buy AZT, as AZT’s

one drug that slows down the disease.

I saw him in the lobby:

        
Hi
,

Pa sent me some more cash to buy

AZT,
but I bought these!

and showed me scores of new CDs.

My pa would think it such a waste