(A short work with background footnotes compiled from the online publication, “The Heart Of War” at: http://theheartofwar.blogspot.com)
Snapshot One:
The Gospels Of War
Chapter One: World War l (April 6, 1917)
Undisciplined, illiterate boys were scooped and poured
into the meshing grind
and out the end of the machine cast iron soldiers
fell and filled the bins,
and by the case were wrapped and shipped
off to the welcome furnace.
And then and there we thought we saved ourselves
from some gnashing, snakehead evil
or from the unknown fate of those
who play the unknown pacifistic card of faith
then risk hand of an unknown God;
or avoided our own man-to-man, sweat-to-sweat and God-to-God
fight-to-the-death by bayonet, bullet, hand.
Chapter Two: World War lI - Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7, 1941)
As I ran from the bombed hospital,
another something happened and
all they ever found of me was my left foot
inside my boot
and then and there my fellow patriots lost themselves.
Loading their blind weapons with consumptive, blazing vengeance,
the infection spread to slaughter the
heart and souls of entire nations,
unaware the wrong ones were
being killed and killing.
Chapter Three: World War ll
After the bombardment,
through the fallen dustscape, stubborn smoke of burning dirt,
he found face of a crying baby,
still held in her headless mother’s arms
and then and there he lost his world.
With time, he began to understand
this grotesque art of human will
serves catalyst to redemptive revelation as
he found himself to be that child
gripped in his headless Savior’s clutch.
Snapshot Two:
Red Gravel (WW ll April 24, 1944)
On April 24, 1944: Earl opened his eyes.
At twenty-two thousand feet above Germany,
the whistling shrieks of a negative, thirtysome degrees
blasted through the shattered belly turret
where he hung
beneath the thunderous, shaking B-17.
Stunned by the explosive splatter
of fragmented metal, glass and blood,
his icing, numbing, wadded-up body spewed red;
suspended there,
these trailing streams of warm, life syrup turned midair
to tiny, falling, bouncing, frozen marbles;
rolling everywhere,
collecting ‘round his boots and leaking body.
His Boy Scout training twisted down a tourniquet,
saved an arm, his life, where he lay;
no longer able to grip and squeeze
his 50 caliber crucifix,
unable to launch a final, deafening
lead-streamed curse
at yet another screaming, airborne satan.
Before exhausting consciousness,
it occurred to him
to try to scatter from the broken, glassy floor,
this growing accumulation of
rolling red gravels,
push them outside before losing altitude
and falling into the melting warmth of earthly airs;
sweep out now
or mop up later.
Defying belief,
this invisibly suspended,
half destroyed, smoking, flying fortress
bled across the heavens,
angrily wailing out to God for sanctuary.
Hardened warriors swarmed the tarmac,
and lost for words at the landed, shredded,
impossibly flown, ghostly airship,
they gently lifted out the dead and wounded
from within its riddled carcass;
the heroic last remains of their tail gunner, friend,
and the burned, yet somehow breathing pilots.
Of those within its crippled, massive length
not one escaped the butchery or carnage;
and with each wound each airman bought
the honor, the passion, the privileges
of freedom.
Snapshot Three:
Walking Subtitles (WW ll approx. January 1944)
When orders came to liquidate the prisoners,
an altogether new awareness
settled on the guarded
and the guards.
What previously passed as mere brutality,
gave way to conversion:
humans into mannequins
whose slippery flesh paved the earth,
becoming landscape,
void of explanation.
There is a night which exists in daylight,
a prison not escaped
with open fields or busy plazas,
and voices never quelled by silence;
memory works that way.
The escaping few, did not;
and courageous soldiers who
risked life to spare souls in their charge,
still live in fear
of whom they were before the edict.
All who lived bespeak their torture quietly
by living, enduring, interpreting for us
what should not be forgotten.
Snapshot Four:
A Certain Metal Manna (WW ll August 6 at 8:15 am, 1945)
The atom bomb,
Oppenheimer’s metal infant of regret,
through a drainpipe in the sky
whistled out a gleeful tune as prelude to
their traveling opera, “Saint Vaporo”;
brought clever tidings of a most strange love:
“Unto you is born this day August 6 at 8:15 a.m.,
of one Enola Gay, great with child,
the mythic Little Boy.”;
and for fifty-seven seconds
ten armed surgeons of the air held their breath,
watched delivery of that spanked, wailing babe,
the triumphant entry of this newborn king.
Out of town, in the mountains, celebrating my fourth birthday,
we waited a few weeks until my mother brought me home
to the greydust, flattened, charred-street desert,
the melted bones of Hiroshima.
I thought it such an awfully grand production,
that day when some strangers came
and burned my new tricycle.
Snapshot Five:
A Nicaraguan Story (Nicaraguan Civil War 1970’s -1980’s, specifically May - July, 1979)
She ran outside,
stood in the street and screamed at the war,
hoping it would kill her;
it having eaten her eldest son,
and after thirteen days of red,
her husband.
Over twenty years later, every day
she walks a stony road,
unlocks the door to the village’s humble
gallery of photos;
one hundred fifty family folk with soldier hearts,
sepia faces,
hung there to watch,
keep guard over their memories.
In the dusty cemetery families buried
all the guns;
AR 15s filled the graves,
so as to find their suited death
with death.
Yet, those graven markers point us up,
indicate to Whom they hope the victims fled;
these wobbly, countless Jesus fingers
poke through el barro de carne y hueso,
(the mud of meat and bone)
aiming at, directing us to safety.
Snapshot Six:
Crutch (El Salvadoran Civil War 1980 - 92)
Destined to be someone’s three-limbed poster child
for peace, for war, for nothing and much more,
they made me their one man parade,
a lifetime limping billboard for
the strangers who will never know my name;
who’ve now moved on,
forgotten the cause which prompted them
so many years ago
to plant a mine along my path to school.
Without a foot, without a leg,
without a way to class again,
I began another education
where pain and sorrow taught me long.
Sweaty years of stumbling as the object of sad eyes,
the target of a taunt, the last in line
have roughly led me to a place
where God’s embrace of fierce gentility
has gripped me so I can’t let go;
for I am not the first child He
has rescued from the public cross
of someone seeking private justice.
Snapshot Seven:
Sand Sculptures (Darfur Civil War 2003 - 2005)
In the forefront of the onslaught
when the Janjaweed attacked,
there she was,
clothed in black,
astride her camel,
screaming at God,
begging
for more bullets.
Later, I moved so close
to watch a moving mouth deny
what the world already knows;
I tried to look inside it,
had to see if flapping Satan’s tongue
was made of spongy rubber.
His desert agents live on rape,
creatively compete to pile
dismembered herds of living humans,
and carve artistic autographs
of blood
on black-stretched canvasses.
Fortunately, genocide is not so ugly
when it involves strangers,
when we watch it long enough,
and when it’s left to be discussed
by journalists and politicians.
If just two hundred thousand more could die,
maybe we could see another
tearful TV special,
get to mourn with Monday friends
at our favorite Starbucks,
and maybe even find excuse
to pray somewhere for peace.
But for now,
another shares her thoughtful recollections,
remembering the home she left:
“…and they gouged out my neighbor’s eyes
and squashed them in the sand,
then placed them in his shrieking hands
to keep as souvenirs.”
Snapshot Eight:
Scarlet Ballet (Iraqi War 2003 - 2008)
He didn’t know why today was different.
Seeking perhaps to distance himself
from this odd, slow-motion scene
of piling, armed carnage,
he decided the hundreds of sprouting wet holes
in so many bodies
were simply a form of deflation
which politely collapsed them on others’ sprawled limbs
as dead leaves float eerily to earth,
discreetly clothing their roots.
He didn’t know why it was different, today.
His trained body absorbed the blows
of jackhammer recoils as
a flashing, fire-river, steel-jacket eruptions
endlessly poured from his weapon
and for a suspended, sacred moment…
he saw it;
without stopping,
his secret eyelids opened and
he saw it:
unfortunate dancers sacrificially indulged
in smoky ballet.
All, born for this moment;
accompanied by spewing rounds
of splattered pings from scalding casings,
their tap-dance symphony of chimes,
with barrel as conductor’s wand
he directed bodies to pirouette,
spin twisted contortions, spill their organs
and teeth
on the stage,
staining each other, expiring as
wilting mannequins;
flopping, red-slimed, open-eyed fish.
Then, without applause,
he stood alone
in that choking, cloudy, gunsmoke heaven,
unsure who had stolen paradise;
he discovered that some ghosts cannot be buried,
they must be disassembled.
He did not know why, today,
war had become so different.
Snapshot Nine:
Tommy (Iraqi War 2003 - 2008)
With these, while in his infant crib
he reached up to feel the air, play with the breath of God.
With these, he pushed toy trucks through backyard grass,
shoveled Cheerios in his mouth,
swung his bat and caressed his dog while sleeping.
With these, he fumbled with his microscope
and slides in science class,
played ball on high school courts and fields,
punched his best friend’s shoulder and
held hands with a teenaged angel.
With these, he typed and clicked the college nights away
while glued with coffee to books and notes,
drove his car to work and class and work and class
and work and class and still found the odd weekend to
repair and paint the home of some
whose wrinkling, failing bodies robbed them of this chore.
With these, folded, he sometimes simply sat,
stilled them to allow some thinking,
rested them for their own good,
clasped them in contented resignation to
the One who planned his path.
With these, he also trained himself
to address an unknown enemy whose misguided heart is bent,
starved for sacrificial deaths
and thus ironically, these days,
he carries weapon to stop war’s blinding bleed.
With these, today he gripped the wheel of his Humvee
as he rushed comrads and first aid
to another market bombing,
then stepped out directly on an IED.
As dirt and metal fragments settled,
choruses of screams and shouts erupted,
I charged the smoke and flame to pull him out of there;
with rescue spelled in ticking seconds,
whitened by the falling dust, I froze,
and as a ghostly statue,
stared across a charred and steaming earth where
in the sand, the only thing God left us with
were the still, warm and open palms
of Tommy’s hands.
Snapshot Ten:
To Toss A Dog A Bone (Iraq War 2003 - 2008)
She tells of a world where dogs
run in the streets with body parts in their mouths;
its relevance lost on us,
those foreign folks with all their issues;
there are so many of these people
and, of course, we know none of them.
I, do not know them or
their beautiful mystic flowing tongues,
whose musical words dance in my ears
to the beat of love and guns.
I, do not know them with their
tears-turned-fears-to-anger lives,
strapped on body packs, trigger switches,
who pray that God will pay attention
if they kill enough of His enemies,
enough of us, of everyone who scares them.
I, do not know those people who
hover-hold their laughing children
hoping to protect them from the
hoards of human locusts lining up outside to kill them,
somewhere, out there, in the TV,
as if they think they know us.
I, do not even know the friendly woman’s radio voice
oozing poetry,
filling up my living room with a soldier’s stunning words:
“When I died,
they washed me out of the turret, with a hose”;
what am I supposed to do with that?
I, do not know if when philosophers say of warring people,
“Without imaginations, they have only the enthusiasts left.”,
whom they judge; place in their erudite line of fire.
I, do not know what caused a woman,
someone’s loving daughter, wife and mother,
victimized by what she saw,
to enter in her diary,
“Crush the heads of those vicious dogs.”,
but I realize she apparently
speaks well for both sides now.
Footnotes:
Snapshot One: Gospels of War Portions based on first hand testimonies of eyewitnesses to World War II and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Snapshot Two: Red Gravel Dedicated to all WWII airmen as exemplified by this actual experience of Earl Burke of the 1st Division, 41st Combat Wing, 384th Bombardment Group, 547th Squadron stationed at Grafton Underwood, England on April 24, 1944.
Snapshot Three: Walking Subtitles Based on testimonies of concentration camp survivors, on both sides.
Snapshot Four: A Certain Metal Manna Fictional scenario based on the true story of Shinichi Tetsutachi, who was the owner of a little tricycle that was badly burned, like him. The boy was almost four years old when the bomb struck; he died on the night of the bombing. Shinichi’s father thought his son was too young to be buried in a lonely grave away from home. He buried Shinichi in their backyard with the tricycle, his favorite possession, hoping his son “could still play with the tricycle.” Shinichi’s remains were dug up by his father in 1985 and transferred to the family grave. The tricycle was donated to the Hiroshima Peace Museum.
Snapshot Five: A Nicaraguan Story Regarding Maria Gonzalez and the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs Museum in Esteli, Nicaragua.
Snapshot Six: Crutch
Snapshot Seven: Sand Sculptures
Snapshot Eight: Scarlet Ballet
Snapshot Nine: Tommy
Snapshot Ten: To Toss a Dog a Bone Directly inspired by radio broadcast of Best Of Our Knowledge on 10/05/2008 featuring Carolin Emcke and Elizabeth Samet.
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.Copyright 2010 Gary Brown/HeartSqueeze Productions
