Wind over coarse grass dried out in the sun.
It’s reckoned that the Indonesians hold
The military balance of advantage;
They are well trained, and will be heavily armed;
Their force is larger, and, far more important,
Trained as a single unit and equipped
With standard weapons. But the Aussies have
The home-ground savvy, and that mystery
Of territorial morale; their sensors,
Desert-trained survival expertise,
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Communications, are superior;
The Papuans are fighting for their kin;
The Thais are masters of new strategies
Derived from generalship in ancient China;
New Zealand radar jamming gear is known
To be state of the art. If, then, the allies
Can weather the first Indonesian blow,
Coordinate their forces, and survive,
Time will be on their side. Such is the talk.
As is traditional, three days before
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The opening ceremonies of the war,
The teams are brought to Adelaide to meet
The press, which, during camp, is kept at bay.
Again traditional, though not explicit,
There is one night when the Victoria
Hotel lays open all its rooms, and feasts
The young contestants, and the liquor’s free.
That night the groupies from around the world
Who’ve followed in the fanzines and the press
The stories of their heroes, true or false,
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Are given access to the warrior-victims
That they have worshipped for so long—who wear
In celebration white bands round their heads,
And who, this night, are granted any crime
They may desire before they go to war.
Across the banquet hall in a bright haze
Of human uproar, music, alcohol,
We may see Tripitaka on the dais,
Perfectly sober, legs crossed under him,
His headband bowed in deep contemplation.
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Around him, and within the many rooms,
Women with naked breasts and crowns of flowers,
Boys with lit torches and with gilded bodies,
Garlanded Brahma bulls and Javan dancers,
Sequined ecdysiasts and blind dirge-singers
Bearded and ancient, their cheeks wet with tears,
Join in the glad communion of the dead.
Film stars and entertainers, famous faces,
Permitted here whatever licence they
And their appetites deem needful, dance
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In the purple strobe-lights and the smoke
Of curious drugs; each woman is corrupted
Into the primal stereotype of woman,
So that her hormones make her swollen breasts
Drip with the child-milk; and each gun-hung male,
His shoulders and his upper arms enlarged
With white gonadic tides of rage and milt,
Feels in his limbs the steroids rot and burn;
They are like mating salmon in their plumes,
Their golden Quetzal-eyes, their jagged flesh.
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Next day the troops discover in their midst
A new phenomenon—a pair of chaplains
Fresh from the Ecotheist seminary:
The brightest and the best, bursting with zeal,
Eager to win acceptance in the group.
The female’s dumpy, caring, and supportive;
Full of old-time phenomenology
And very big on how we all must share
Our common feelings of inadequacy;
She wears the uniform of the thunder-thighed,
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The blue stretch slacks, the blouse, the golden pin
With the earth-symbol—dot within a circle—
Denoting membership within the Church.
The male is a believer in free love,
An existentialist, a PhD,
Given to saying “hey;” with skinny arms,
A mustache, and that look which says that I
Am fully open to experience.
The Church, it seems, has sent the warriors
These, as reminders what they’re fighting for,
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And tactfully arranged for their arrival
Just at the peak of beverage fatigue.
Billy Macdonald, of the Ned Kellies,
Observes that it’s an ill wind blows no good:
If their supplies run low, as often happens,
The fat one might be nice with pinto beans.
But glory calls; the morning of the war
Dawns bright and cold; the Krichauff Range, like scales
Of an ancient monster, rears over plains
Exhausted by the power of the sun.
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The warriors have moved, in one traverse,
Forty-eight tons of war materiel
Across the DMZ; and that is all
They’ll be allowed until the mort is blown.
Media drones buzz by above, ignored;
The techies set up radars, while the scouts
Advance toward the base camps in the hills;
The carriers lie gasping on the ground,
And General Kung speaks with his officers.
Three days later: first contact. A night raid
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By Indonesian fighter planes against
The radars of the allies on the hills.
The mission’s a success; the eyes are blinded,
Three of the five planes get away, and Kung
Is much perplexed, for by this sudden blow
He knows the enemy has spent his fuel
Reserve, and must have little left. The Aussies
Can distil from eucalyptus leaves
Some drops of bike and aviation spirit;
The enemy lacks this technology.
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It must be one big strike, then. Just as Kung
Comes to this quick conclusion and prepares
His soldiers for the worst, there’s an attack
In force, against the allied camps.
The allies have advantage of terrain:
The enemy must charge a barren slope.
But Kung has chosen to equip his force
With few firearms, and those but light ones too;
The Indonesians must take heavy losses
Storming the glacis, but it’s now quite clear
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The allies cannot hold the ridge. Kung sends
His specialists in hand-to-hand melee—
His Burmese infantry, his berserk Thais,
And Tripitaka with his kendo sword,
To hold the enemy while others move
The indispensable equipment back
To safety. Now is the old game of blood.
The sunrise shines upon the golden flesh
Of boys and girls in the bright flush of health,
Their muscles warm and ready, their swift breath
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Perfectly balanced to the tasks they serve;
And all is motion, and the red blood runs
As if its springs were endless, and its beauty
As harmless as the rush of sperm or milk.
And till that moment when the mastery
Of spirit over body, joy in pain,
Bewildered by some wound that severs it,
Is broken—and the martial shape the mind
Imposes as a template on the flesh,
That fiery net invisible that holds
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The feeble chemistry of life together,
Ceases to coincide with the breathed truth—
Until that time these children of the wars
Are as
immortal and invulnerable.
Those who say war is horrible speak only
Half the truth; the other half is joy.
And Tripitaka, stripped down to the waist,
His hair tied back, his sword glittering,
Is like the motion of a running stream,
The rainbow trout within it, and the liquid
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Running in the creature’s arteries.
No weapon touches him. His few companions
Fall one by one, and only chance—the flash
Of a landmine going off, that clears the stage
A moment, and brings him to his senses—
Rescues him from that place of light and blood.
Out of the rearguard he alone escapes.
The Indonesians sought to end the war
By this one stroke. Indeed, the allies,
Broken into small bands and bled of troops,
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Seem to be finished; but this kind of war
Is more against the sun and need and time
Than against human beings. The Indonesians
Have expended most of their supplies
And are but poorly furnished with the tools,
The water-stills, and desert expertise
That Kung relies on for his victory.
And now there is a slow guerrilla war
Waged with the bow, the stake-pit, and the knife.
The Indonesians’ radios are jammed
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And thus they cannot separate to forage;
They die of thirst, of sunstroke, and disease.
The allies live on roasted bandicoots,
The pods of wattle trees, the moist petals,
Tender stems and tubers of the lily,
And brew their water from the billabongs;
Their electronic sensors show them when
The enemy is at a disadvantage;
And then they strike, and quickly fade away.
Pictures the memory might store of this,
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A little epic in itself: the smoke
Of Indonesian campfires rising from
Behind the bald head of a grassy hill
At dawn, and the smell of eucalyptus;
Dried up Lake Amadeus, like a paisley
Painted in red, grey, ochre, dazzling white,
Seen from a spotter plane whose canvas buzzes
With the light two-stroke in the afternoon;
Messenger-service on a motorbike,
Swooping and skidding over grassy dunes;
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A valley all ablaze with pollen, yellow
Red and pink, the naked-stamened flowers
Of mallee, myrtle, melaleuca, gum;
A bloated body by a watercourse;
The sunflash on a flight of arrowheads;
A colony of furry wallabies;
A dark storm-mountain in the evening sky
Lit by the bronze sun and the silver lightning;
The yells of parrots in the ragged trees.
But Tripitaka has a troubling dream.
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He sees that young girl warrior he killed
In the first dawn raid against the camp;
She was a splendid master of the sword
And might have taken him but for a stumble;
He dreams about her death, her little smile,
Her Khmer beauty, Sumikami-like;
And in this simple dream she has become
The face of Chance at Vassae when they fought;
And then the face of Beatrice; and now
He wakes to feel the thick juice of his sex
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Slip from his body in a living stream.
He looks up at the shiny black night sky,
A dome of bright designs and hidden meaning
Like the great driver of a music speaker;
And all the lines of star-connections point
To the gold star that he knows is Mars
And the long veil of the falling comet.
At last he knows his soul. He must take arms
In the cause of his former enemies
And offer up his body as a penance
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To Chance’s heirs, the pioneers of Mars.
The chaplains, meanwhile, have been worth the feeding:
After each skirmish they remind the troops
Not to enjoy their triumph, nor to glory
In their skill, which is unfairly gained;
But to think only of the sacrifice
And feel the sufferings of the enemy
As if they were one’s own. This last, perhaps,
Might be a thought redundant; in all wars
Soldiers in close engagement, face to face,
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Have always loved their enemy, and have seen
In him or her the image of themselves;
Notwithstanding, in revenge, deceit,
And loss, a hatred cordial as any
Divorcing husband for a cheerful wife,
Junior exec for a department head,
Or pinched caseworker for a legislature.
One morning Tripitaka’s own patrol
Draws the short straw and gets the company
Of “Scooter” (as the male reverend
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Likes to be called). They are to circle round
The enemy’s defenses and report
All of advantage to the allies’ plans.
At noon they take a wounded prisoner,
And having questioned her must then decide
How to dispose of her. If she is left,
She’ll die, after some days of agony.
If she is brought along, the chances are
The inconvenience, or her cries, will lead
To their discovery as they return.
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The only way is death; and Tripitaka
Draws his sword, his face as grey as dreams.
But Scooter throws his body in the way.
“Some things I won’t be part of. I’ll report
What happens here. I make my stand for mercy.”
The soldiers know he is a commissar
Sent by the powers that be to get control
Of this, the last free ritual, however
Bloody, old, and undermined by guilt;
But it’s their duty to obey him, and
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They leave the brown girl begging for her death.
A few days later the fortunes of war
Bring this ground under the allies’ control;
The girl is found; what she herself has not
Torn with her teeth to shreds in her last fever,
The dingoes and the birds have visited.
The camp is sullen, and the word goes round
That General Kung has had enough at last;
He calls a conference of all the soldiers
And asks wherein their perfect duty lies.
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And Tripitaka speaks for the first time:
The moment he’s awaited all his life.
“Don’t you think, comrades, that this world we live in
Has suddenly grown old? But we are soldiers;
We date our lives from what our lives are for:
The moment of our death. (Some of us then
Can count our ages by the days.) Or is it that
We are the eldest thing on earth, the metal
That can never tarnish, or the tree
That puts out bitter pollen every spring?
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There is no place for us here any more.
These chaplains we must feed will change the rules:
The Church will settle all the quarrels now.
But I have seen at night a star of gold,
The planet of the god who rules our kind;
A world is being born, and here we are,
Fighting for what we don’t believe—a star
Tha
t needs our arms and calls us to a war
Whose end’s not peace but more abundant life.
What is the real duty of a soldier?
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Our work is to disturb the course of things,
To task the world up to its very brink,
To be the bloody spade that turns the sod,
To prove the game is honest by our deaths;
We’re the account on which the world writes checks,
And where its money is its heart will be;
It is our duty then, say I, to take
Our swords and offer them to Mars, the new
Republic of the breath of humankind.”
At this—but even now (when history
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Is not a comfortable subject for
The young, for what sense can it make, what point,
When there’s no hope and no direction to it?),
Yes, even now, I think, the Mutiny,
And the events it sparked, are still familiar,
And do not need rehearsal in these lines.
Recall then how the soldiers voted for it,
But for the Papuans, who, sympathetic,
Felt it their duty to continue fighting—
How in their suicide attack upon
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The Indonesian camp, they died in glory—;
How then the Indonesians were “suborned”
To kiss the flag of Mars; how other groups
Of gladiators heard the call; how some
Fought through to the Woomera shuttle base;
How others, crucified for their rebellion,
Died in the flies along the desert roads;
How the new chaplains were exchanged for arms;
Of the wild struggle at the launching-pads;
How seven shuttles, burned with laser fire,
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Escaped to orbit under Tripitaka.
Tripitaka after many battles against the Terran forces comes to Mars. We learn of the cave-dwellings of the colonists; of the progress of the terraforming; of the children Wolf and Irene, and Chance the younger, the son of Beatrice and Charlie; of how the children learned to fly; and of how Tripitaka was forgiven.
Scene iii:
The Coming of Tripitaka to Mars
A rush of driving rain. It could be evening
On a deserted airstrip in New Zealand,
The parking lot of a provincial high school
During vacation, in British Columbia;
A wet parade ground in the southern islands
Of pacific Chile, or the Hebrides.
Beyond the chainlink fence, though, there’s a green
Too brilliant in this semidarkness: moss,
Hummocked, fantastic, with a haze of brown
10
Or mauve calyptrae, heavy with white drops
Of rain that join and pool and slowly run
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 17