Mikhail lived with war in Iraq from the time she was fifteen years old. The war came with different names—the Iran-Iraq War, Desert Storm, Mother of All Battles—but it always acted with the same consistency. She has recalled that there was a room in her family house in Baghdad that her mother dubbed “the war room.” It was located by the stairs and designed for security, a survival space where the family stayed during sirens and explosions. That’s how she got the idea to take the war-related activities that she observed daily and make them look like any other worthwhile human endeavor.
Here is the title poem from her book The War Works Hard, which was written in 1994 and published in Arabic in 2000:
The War Works Hard
How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning,
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places,
swings corpses through the air,
rolls stretchers to the wounded,
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers,
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins . . .
Some are lifeless and glistening,
others are pale and still throbbing . . .
It produces the most questions
in the minds of children,
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missiles
into the sky,
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters,
urges families to emigrate,
stands beside the clergymen
as they curse the devil
(poor devil, he remains
with one hand in the searing fire) . . .
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed,
teaches lovers to write letters,
accustoms young women to waiting,
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures,
builds new houses
for the orphans,
invigorates the coffin makers,
gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
and paints a smile on the leader’s face.
The war works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.
(Translated by Elizabeth Winslow)
“The War Works Hard” is a new kind of antiwar poem. It is sardonic and takes an odd, funny, reverse angle on the hateful experience of war itself. Mikhail was writing from inside a war, on the side being attacked, while American poets such as Thomas Lux and Lucia Perillo were writing against the war from the side of the attackers, the American side. Mikhail paid for her poem with experience, but the poems by all three poets are infused with a sense of bitter helplessness and irony.
“The War Works Hard” unfolds with manic energy, which is deftly enacted by the short lines. Diligent movement characterizes the stichic structure—a single stanza of fifty-three lines. The mordant personification of the war, as an industrious, indefatigable worker who has been underappreciated, gives the poem a faux-naïf quality, an understated and plaintive comedy. Personification, the attribution of human qualities to inanimate objects, animals, or ideas, has special purpose as the basis for allegory—think of those medieval morality plays in which characters are named “Lust” or “Hope.” This figure of speech indicates that general ideas, and not individual people, are being dramatized.
Mikhail’s personification has special ironic force: the poor war works so hard! No wonder the poem begins with two exclamatory sentences. The war gets up early in the morning—notice how emphatically the translator assonates the e sounds at the beginning of the poem (“How eager / and efficient! / Early . . .”)—and starts waking up sirens and dispatching ambulances. The poem is matter of fact about the everyday cruelty of the war that so industriously “swings corpses through the air, / rolls stretchers to the wounded, / summons rain / from the eyes of mothers . . .” As Robert Hayden does in “The Whipping,” Mikhail conflates personal tears and rainy weather.
There is an ellipsis after the observation that “many things” have been dislodged. The poem pauses for a moment, as if to notice that some of those “things” are newly dead people (“lifeless and glistening”) while others are barely alive (“pale and still throbbing”). The war dramatically marks the transition point, the thinnest of thresholds, between life and death. It turns people into objects.
The recognition behind the poem—the machinery of war never rests—is chilling. The poem enacts that recognition through its catalogs. Of course, it “produces the most questions / in the minds of children,” who haven’t yet learned to accept the unacceptable, and simultaneously “entertains the gods.” This phrase brings to mind these lines from Shakespeare: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport” (King Lear, act 4, scene 1, lines 36–37). Mikhail purposely conflates celebratory fireworks with destructive missiles: “shooting fireworks and missiles / into the sky.”
The unrelenting war changes everyone’s life. It puts doctors to work, “urges families to emigrate,” and stands infernally next to clergymen, who see it as the work of the devil. It’s typical of the strategy here for the speaker to sympathize with the “poor devil,” who remains “with one hand in the searing fire.” The war sweeps everyone up. It has almost too many beneficiaries—it inspires long-winded tyrants and battle-tested generals, and it even gives “themes” to poets, who find the subject inescapable and thus write poems like the very one we are reading.
Dunya Mikhail wrote “The War Works Hard” with fateful understanding of what war does to people, those who kill and those being killed—the lovers, the journalists, the newly minted orphans, the over-eager coffin makers, the hardworking gravediggers. Some people’s lives are destroyed; others receive financial benefit. Everyone must be involved—no one escapes unscathed from its unending destruction. The war works so hard and yet, as the last lines ruefully conclude, “no one gives it / a word of praise.” But Mikhail’s poem does close on the word “praise”—the poet is the only one who suggests such recognition, in an unlikely ode, an inverted and sardonic praise poem. It approaches the subject of violent destruction with cutting wit, fierce humor, and brave humanity.
Stanley Kunitz
* * *
“Halley’s Comet”
(1995)
Halley’s Comet
Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there’d be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground’s edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
“Repent, ye sinners!” he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I’d share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room
.
The whole family’s asleep
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.
Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street—
that’s where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I’m the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.
Stanley Kunitz catapulted himself back into childhood in his poem “Halley’s Comet” (1995). Kunitz was five years old on May 19, 1910, the day that Halley’s Comet was scheduled to pass the earth and, if it strayed off course, crash into our planet, thus potentially blowing up the world. He was an old man when he wrote “Halley’s Comet,” but the language of the poem migrates back to his first-grade self. We are placed immediately in his elementary school classroom. The backdrop is the general anticipation and widespread sense of impending doom over the unusually close approach of the comet, which ended up brushing the earth with its tail.
The return of Halley’s Comet in 1986 may have spurred Kunitz to engage this childhood memory from seventy-six years earlier. He kept his childhood alive in himself—he was never far from those memories of a hardscrabble life in Worcester, Massachusetts—and obsessively pursued what he called “the theme of the lost father.” The poem is stichic, like Dunya Mikhail’s poem, and spans the course of a single day in thirty-seven lines, one ongoing stanza. Kunitz employs an unrhymed three-beat, or trimeter, line, which is the meter Thom Gunn utilized for his elegy for his mother, “The Gas-poker,” and Elizabeth Bishop marshaled to invoke her seven-year-old self in her epiphanic lyric “In the Waiting Room,” also set in Worcester, where she grew up. Bishop’s poem, which is about losing and finding a self, stands behind Kunitz’s testimonial like a protective older sister.
The poem begins with Miss Murphy’s droll observation that school would be called off if Halley’s Comet hit the earth and destroyed the planet. The white chalk on the blackboard at the beginning of the poem foreshadows the “starry sky” at its end. Miss Murphy’s analysis is followed immediately by the fire-and-brimstone preacher declaring the end of the world. The poem moves effortlessly from the teacher in the classroom, to the preacher on the edge of the playground, then to the family at home at suppertime. The speaker recalls not just the fear that overtook him at the roaring approach of the comet, the sadness that he felt over his final dinner with his mother and sisters, but also the excitement of the event, the thrill of something life-altering, the possibility of being hit by a cosmic snowball from afar.
Two-thirds of the way through the poem, the verb tense changes from the past to the present: “The whole family’s asleep . . .” Now it is night, the boy is the only one awake, a sole consciousness, and slips up the stairwell to the roof. This is a threshold moment: he moves from inside the house, emblem of the domestic, to the outdoors, where he stands on the roof and looks searchingly into the sky. Both literally and metaphorically, he has moved from the safety of the indoors to the exposure of the outdoors. The final turn in the poem comes when he looks up to address his father.
Kunitz never knew his father, who committed suicide before he was born, but he mourned the loss all his life. His mother never forgave Solomon Kunitz for killing himself and eradicated all traces of his memory from their house. Kunitz’s poem “The Portrait” tells the story of coming down from the attic with a pastel portrait of “a long-lipped stranger” and showing it to his mother, who ripped it to shreds and slapped Kunitz across the face. At sixty-four years old, he writes, “I can feel my cheek / still burning.”
At the end of “Halley’s Comet,” there’s an agitated longing in the way the speaker suddenly calls out, “Look for me, Father, on the roof . . .” He is scanning the heavens for a root connection to someone he never knew. In this bit of magical thinking, he is also letting his father know that the family has moved to a top floor of a tenement at the bottom of Green Street—how else could they find each other? That’s why he must identify himself to his father:
I’m the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.
This is an image preserved in amber. The boy is forever locked in time, and in some sense the poet will always be that boy, wearing a white flannel nightgown on a gravel rooftop, looking up at the star-filled sky, searching the infinite spaces for his father, who never comes, and waiting for the apocalypse.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
* * *
“Song”
(1995)
Brigit Pegeen Kelly was struck by lightning when she wrote “Song,” a poem that has the rich, inexplicable strangeness of a folk tale. It is magical and has irrational power. It seems to come from another realm of experience, a contemporary poem with the authority of an ancient allegory. It is the title poem of Kelly’s second book and teaches us something critical about her practice. She was unflinching in the way she faced dark human truths, some of them unspeakable, and still insisted on singing in the face of them. As the poet Lisa Williams puts it in “The Necessity of Song,” “The persistence of music (a trope for poetry) is a task undertaken in all of Kelly’s work: to continue to sing in spite of, of even in response to, terror and fear.”
Song
Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then
They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat’s head
Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly
The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away
Beside which the goat’s headless body lay. Some boys
Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined.
The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they
Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school
And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything.
The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks.
The head called to the body. The body to the head.
They missed each other. The missing grew large between them,
Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until
The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies
Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills.
Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder,
Sang long and low until the morning light came up over
The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped. . . .
The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named
The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after
The night’s bush of stars, because the goat’s silky hair
Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit.
The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night
She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train’s horn
Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke
To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang
Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats.
She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily
That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming
Made it so. But one night the girl didn’t hear the train’s horn,
And the next morning she woke to an empty yard. The goat
Was gone. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm
Had passed through while she slept, wind and stone
s, rain
Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone
Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called
To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called
And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling
Like the feeling of the stones gouging the soft undersides
Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat’s body
By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles
At the goat’s torn neck. Then somebody found the head
Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take
These things away so that girl would not see them.
They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.
They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear
Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke. . . .
But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have
Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they
Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job,
Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark.
What they didn’t know was that the goat’s head was already
Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn’t know
Was that the goat’s head would go on singing, just for them,
Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen,
Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
100 Poems to Break Your Heart Page 35