Mar
Monday Date: A Poet and War
I can’t say that I like a lot of poetry. I try to. I really do. But when I think of poetry I think of my massive anthology of Romantic Poets from a lit class in college. In the midst of reading those dense, 20-page epic poems by Blake or Shelley my eyes would cross, my head become muddled, and all power of reason leave.
There are a few poems that I’ve discovered on my own and that hit me. They’re short and potent, and usually pretty dark. But they get me jazzed and wondering, “How the hell did this guy/gal do that?”
For this week’s Monday Date, I present one of these poems. After the jump: “Losses” by Randall Jarrell.
Losses
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes – and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
for us to figure we had died like.)In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores –
And turned into replacements and woke up
One morning, over England, operation.
It wasn’t different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(but an easy one for anyone to make).
We read our mail and counted up our missions –
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school –
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, “Our causalities were low.”
They said, “Here are the maps”: we burned the cities.It was not dying – no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: “Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?”
