for Jeremy Hilton, Christina Lamb, and Anne Jorgensen

Day One
20.3.03.

Surfacing from memory, vague as waking
from a dream when it's already fading -
'the sense of intolerable wrong'

They've gone in, you said
some time while we were sleeping.
Same county, even.

All morning, the grief thickens
on another Spring day as bright as heaven.

Blue England, IN FOR THE KILL.

Eco-buildings in the balmy air, fragile, new
computers launching B52s -

I need to hear your voice.

At the corner shop up the hill
I can only buy red candles.

And in your kindness, you bring daffodils
their buds still sheathed like bullets.

Numb eyes, tight mouths, driving, walking
and you say it: it's as if something is wrong
in the deepest part of you, gesturing down.

Their khaki figures spectral in the sand-mist
Death's dream
	and everywhere
Become the same desert. One world.

Day Two
21.3.03.

It plummets from the air in the downturn
of his Radio 4 news voice
a helicopter falling out of the sky -
six Royal Marines, all of them dead,
and one of them, nephew, could be you.

Any one of them is you
to each family kept waiting
who do not yet know
and will not be told
until they choose to do so.

'These things happen in war', he states
and whatever else he goes on to say
by way of politeness, or platitude -
the fact is you know nothing.

			And in this sand-haze
everyone is an unknown soldier
until he's recognized, one way or another,
and the whale of war that swallowed him
				disgorges him again.

Outside, the pile driver on site
goes on rhythmically pounding at the ground,
as its echo becomes the day... and the night.

Day Three
22.3.03.

Great balls of fire...as if the sun has descended
lighting up the night in one orange flaming
effulgent explosion after another -

The Shock and Awe opera has begun,
and still the white streetlights stay on
and still the poor and innocent cannot leave the city.

Waves of attacks that included US air force F15 Strike Eagle
Artillery including the 32 AS90 155mm self-propelled guns
of the 3rd Regiment Royal Horse Artillery...
bombarded with all the details
as if this techno-rhetoric can sanction it.

And the one true thing: a lone Bedouin woman
fearlessly confronting an entire tank regiment
spitting and cursing, her sheep scattered everywhere...

Dame Ragnel no one is listening to.
These knights who have no Holy Grail
only a dictator's swollen head
and a people's dubious freedom.

And the more you read
the more overwhelming it is.

Shocked but not awed, oh yes,
and at this priveleged distance
with a free-floating eye that refuses to be blinded
for as long as it can see.

We sit in the sunlit garden, shredding the past
old records of pain at our feet -
as a questioned plane climbing overhead
reflected in the light, so nearly
becoming the blue of the sky, as it turns, translucent...

And if one 4 year old innocent lies
wrapped in blood-stained bandages
being hand fed American potato crisps
not expected to survive -

Is it worth it? Can it be?

Oil in trenches belching flame, smudging the sky
for some cover as another night approaches.
The desert waiting for more funereal debris,
and no one speaking of the waste.

No one speaking the unspeakable waste.

Day Four
23.3.03.

So when it happens for the third time
in three days, that is, three consecutive days
as if the first could be excused, the second
wondered at—and then ?

When an English plane is shot down 
by an American missile, returning
you have to ask yourself (don't you ?)
what a higher power may be writing
in the invisible ink of the sky...

No hiding it. Beside all the talk of precision,
the reality of what it also is: a bloody mess

Messy as two English soldiers
with palpable grief on their faces
looking down a hole at two crumpled Iraqi jackets
and a makeshift white flag raised on a stick -
Too late.

Too late.

And while all roads lead to Baghdad
it's too late now, whatever happens
(whatever unspeakable poison is being stirred
to leap from that hornet's nest of rage - )

there can be no turning back.

Day Five
24.3.03.

And what do you do with a man
who lives like a Chinese Emperor
torturing his own, in the tightening circles
of his own mazy paranoia?

Who builds a mosque where the minarets
are turrets of upturned missiles ?

Who sanctions unimagineable sadism
to safeguard his own megolomania -

How do you wage peace against him?
He has to go - he will not go
and there are plenty more like him in the family.

Even O.B.L has his number
A secular infidel (which is putting it nicely)

And under the bottom line, another line
that nobody wants to talk about
we know he has weapons of mass destruction
because we sold them to him in the first place.

Which is how a war can be just
and just a massive irony, all at once.

Day Six
25.3.03.

MOTHER OF ALL BATTLES the headline reads
as if any mother would sanction this
the mother in the desert who doesn't exist

And if you're looking for Kali
with her dancing necklace of skulls
you'll find her near enough
among all these broken remains

And yet there is a mother behind this machine -
a No Mother. A mother like rage
slapping every little soldier's face
a mother like ice, refusing his cries

And there's a mother in a man's heart too
Assad from Bristol (in Britain since 1979)
knows her as his heart reached his stomach
when the coalition army went in

Now his voice choking back the tears
as she asks him -
the soil defiled, he says
the Mother of a Nation.

Day Seven
26.3.03.

The Seven Days of Uncreation.

And on the Seventh Day God did not say
let another unidentified cruise missile
fall upon the ordinary people of Baghdad
out shopping for their groceries -

turning one woman and her child in a car
into heat-blackened blasted pulp.
The commentator tries to put it nicely
It was as if she had evaporated.

And it's true where beauty is on the line
everything that is loving and human
can pass away as easily
			unless we choose it.

Meanwhile, the cover-all rhetoric goes on.
In Basra, although nothing is clear
we believe the people are about to rebel
unfortunately, we're shelling the hell out of them.

In Baghdad, the sand cakes everything
the prayed-for storm...

Rapturous applause for the President
his confidence like lip gloss
concealing every trace of anxiety.

And when the food aid finally arrives
and Lady Bountiful prepares her speech
they drag it out of the back of the van
scrapping over it like dogs.

Day Eight
27.3.03.

It looks like Apocalypse Now, he says
at the appalling bloodshed on the road
of the Republican Guard leaving Basra -
unimagineable imagineable carnage in the sand
but like a movie (you note), as if only
a movie could contain it

a television screen frame it
and it's not containable - it can only be veiled,
and those that passed this way
will never pass again.

Were all their lives waiting for this,
to be blasted into faceless smithereens?

Their souls whipped to the wind
into the vast sightless borderland
where they might linger for as long
without an answer...

Day Nine
28.3.03.
after seeing The Hours

What they won't admit
at their luxurious podiums
flanked by the stars and stripes

while people scramble out of the market place
terrified, dazed, their lives changed forever
and retaliation arcs its way towards Kuwait City -

What they won't admit
is there's no end to it

and that all we have
is no further away than now
and never in some imaginary future

you lying in my arms
in our after-dream of loving...

and a woman wading into a river
her coat pockets weighted with stones.

Day Ten
29.3.03.

I look in the mirror
and what do I see?
The Daily Horror
staring at me

The only mirror
I can read
and your face

And what it still means
to live for beauty

that does not lie
in the name of fantasy
through what is left
of its teeth...

Our son did not die
an unspeakable death
beside a dirt road
stripped of his uniform -
he was slain in active service
fighting for democracy
and the Iraqi people
like the Army commander told us.

He was a hero
she blocks her ears.

He was a hero
she screams in tears.

Day Eleven
30.3.03.

The Mother of All Poisons

and behind it all, imagine
a beautiful woman
part veiled in khaki -
hair permed, eyebrows plucked
the wide bow of her mouth
rolled with discreet lipstick

19,000 litres of botulimum toxin
8,500 litres of anthrax
against the infidel

for which she is duly feted and promoted.

What is it in a woman's flow
that can turn to such
aniseed destruction?

Anything for a father's love,
her own heart even?

Day Twelve
31.3.03.

One life for four
does that mean four times as good ?
His suicidal detonating car
and all to please Papa
who he thinks is Allah

Papa is pleased, too
secure in his palatial bunker
preaching the gospel
he will never live

while this poor fool
is given two posthumous medals
that he cannot see
and will never wear.

If we could erase the name of Saddam Hussein, we should
and only remember those
who gave their lives for what they believed
however stupid it was -
no more so than ours
befriended by farcical fire
delivered back home
with all due ceremony
like pieces of a piano
wrapped in union jacks.

Day Thirteen
1.4.03.

What matters more
that we talk about the war
or slip into peace in the sunlit garden?
Lying back on the grass, as we drift together
our ears filled with birdsong, despite the cars

waking to one robin, fearless as bright,
with a song the size of the whole tree around him!

Then going up inside
turning your flat around
dragging pieces from room to room
into a progressed nest -

It's like leading parallel lives.
Easy you might say, with it happening there
without this clear blue sky shattered by explosions

You could say that, but if it's true
that we can only live what we do
seeding the matrix with possibility,
then the more we live what we feel
the closer we are to peace

and haven't you notice we all seem to be needing to?

Meanwhile the battle for Basra continues,
and the one Iraqi soldier who knew his own mind
spent three days in a chicken coop waiting to surrender.

Day Fourteen
2.4.03.

My April Fool declares
this day does not exist,
except for random acts
of kindness and beauty -

So tell me the news
no, tell me about
one fine thing you saw
in the midst of hell

The butterfly on the battlefield
that shimmered in the light,
that no bullet could pass through
becoming the sky -
your voice saying All Shall Be Well.

And shakes his cap and bells.
And shakes his cap and bells.

Day Fifteen
3.4.03.

The most poignant thing of all
to reach the centre and find
there is no enemy left

It was all in the mind.
Waves of heat, melting...
It was all a game of make-believe
out of one man's ego

'Why did we have to kill so many people?'
the Sergeant asks, dazed, sighing

One thousand, for one
who refused to surrender
and still more to come

What is real
the stream of broken humanity
in cars, buses, taxis, anything they can get a ride on,
in the hospitals of every stricken city and town

What is real
when the surgery is done
and the patient is lying helpless on the ground -

Day Sixteen
4.4.03.

Allah do not let us down!
the imam cries
his teeth bared in pain -

and then his prayer
an Old Testament curse
to Allah or Yahweh
what does it matter?

It's only Nobodaddy not listening.
And the God of the English and the Americans?

And the God beyond all of this
we can only reach
when who we think He is
fails to hear our prayers

fails to acceed to our retrograde schemes.

Meanwhile the sky is falling on the imam's head
the sky of his mind, of all he has lived by,
when Allah falls silent.

Pity him - and be glad
that when his heart breaks
he may know his God
like a phoenix out of the ashes.

Day Seventeen
5.4.03.
Men like Hitler can't change.
They have to be bumped out of existence
			Sri Aurobindo

We are all still well and happy
smiles the actor playing Saddam
(who is Saddam)
in the blurred video footage
as they sit round a makeshift table

Even the airport still belongs to us,
those American soldiers are just visiting.

Machine gun fire in the infragreen light

the death toll ticking by
like digits on a supply meter
the wheel unstoppably turning,

until the mains switch is shut.

What does it take?
A tank
with a lasso of thick rope, in reverse,
dragging the black metal statue, crashing
off its concrete plinth face down into the dust!

(If it was only that much).

Day Eighteen
6.4.03.
after John Simpson

He saw it falling
seconds before impact -
a white cone with a red nose
(no clown, this missile)

a dozen people died
with a click of its exploding fingers,
and the Kurdish translator beside him
kicked with shrapnel in the legs
bleeds to death in minutes - his blood
sand from his hourglass, all spent...

Meanwhile, his report is impeccable
powered by residual adrenalin
his strength of syntax intact;
and here is a man
who has nearly died
and who can see
this hourglass is all we have
this day, hour, moment

this is the pearl of our lives.
Perhaps it is our immortality
we also need to be saved from
until we have learnt how to live.

Day Nineteen
7.4.03.

Peasants in khaki lolling about
on Louis XIV furniture smoking weed
only the decor is all fake
and these roundheads have no regrets...

Here is a man who had gold wherever he wanted
and nothing inside him
like his palaces, all empty now.

This one, probably never even used
'only occupied by a flock of doves'. Sweet irony.

And this is the fate of the gold of this world,
it is always overcome.

Ask any alchemist: all you can take
is its reflected light inside you.
But ask Midas, and he's nowhere to be found.

Ask the Sun King, and his sun has long gone down
with all the other despots who merely try to be
monarchs of this world.

The only thing this one never had
was all he lacked: a crown.
(No heaven above his head.)

Now the soldiers are hounds, and he
is metamorphosed into a stag, a fox,
a lightning-blasted tree.

Day Twenty
8.4.03.

'There's gold in there
let us in, let us in!' they are shouting.

When the lid comes off
behold a people who have had nothing,
who have been starving.

Now anything is wealth:
An old man wheeling his bicycle
with a heavy door strapped to it
two boys with a wardrobe on wheels
a lorry crammed with warehouse food
finally flagged down...

They call it anarchy
and if you look closely, you may see
that peace can only come
in a community of freedom

And that to be surrounded by the stuff of dreams
and not have any taste of it
may be the subtlest torture of all -

the envy of our thrall.

Day Twenty One
9.4.03.
Rise like lions after slumber...
		Shelley

We filled the peace bridge spanning the road
like a rainbow on that first evening -
now there's only a handful remaining
with the end of day traffic passing beneath.

They are dancing in the street.
And as a shiver passes through the watching world,
they hoist a ladder to the statue, noose the neck,
Marines and Iraqis together - as the roar goes up
and...the rest is history.

Can what is created by force
only be brought down by it?

The sledgehammered monster is silent.
The crammed mortuary like a metal box
oozing blood, is silent.

And the people on a pedestrian bridge
in a small English country town
gaze down wondering

War and peace - peace and war,
the polarity like a metronome
snaking in its trance of duality

until we get to the love beyond either.

coda
13.4.03
for Ali Ismael Abbas

In the eyes, no recrimination
only the even gaze of a question
no one can begin to answer...

outsized, like brown beryls, looking up
the lips full, beautiful as he is,
his lustrous black hair recently cut
resting on a favoured pillow, with its flaming tulip
beside his right ear - his sister's ringed hand
poised, withdrawn from smoothing his brow

...the bandaged stumps of his arms, blown off
he wakes to, at every other moment
as the nightmare of pain continues,
their perfect use still inches from him
his blistered chest like a terrible painting
coated in layers of cream... the squalid
children's ward like a manger all around him -

No room at the inn for Love.

'It would be better if poor Ali died' says his doctor
but he lives to gaze at us across the miles, across time
where the soul knows no distance -
stretched on the helpless cross of his bed
with Mary behind him weeping
still asking us why?

Day 365
Easter 2004

Liberator become oppressor:
two sides of an emotional coin
as slippery as grease in the palm.

A people pulled apart in all directions.

A wound constantly re-opened
before it can heal over:
crucifixion without end.

Counting the days, till when?
And as many suicide bombers
awaiting a rude awakening in Paradise.

'We must not abandon this historic struggle'
proudly declares our Prime Minister
(wishing he was Churchill - )
and in the same breath, the next conscript
strapping explosives to his empty chest.

Let go of war? As inconceivable
as the President abandoning the White House.

And the reason remains dark
it flows like blood under the ground 
blood that everyone needs
but not human blood.

It only drives machines.

Hatred makes machines out of us all.

One small step
into the Kingdom
when we see what we are fighting for.

It means we must connect
must talk, must listen and express
must agree that ceasefire is the only key.

It means we have to pause.

The machine stops. It is switched off.

The way is clear: we fight for oil
under the guise of moraIity,
or we bow to the Earth's command
to live by a new integrity.

Oil, or human blood.
Hatred, fear and revenge - or love.

One giant leap

out of Hell.

For The Z-Man (Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi)
14.10.04
i.m. Kenneth Bigley

No death is good enough for you
in the farthest reaches of your hatred
to play with another man's soul
like a cat dangling a mouse
(but without its animal necessity)
is a crime that mirrors your punishment
in its mediaeval monstrosity -

You have no place in a world of love
so you have cast yourself out to the edges
where no human heart can reach you
imagining your purity, deluded fool -

And you shall die by the sword, no doubt
but that isn't enough for vengeance or knowledge,
you must finally wake up to what you've done
then see yourself dismembered
vanishing in front of your own eyes
turned into the nothing you are
each atom of your frozen imago crunched
and scattered back into the fathomless, velvet blackness

so it may never reform like this again.

HOME

text © Jay Ramsay 2004

images (blood, oil, sand) © John Mingay 2004

A Raunchland Publication

2004