Poetry against silence
As the genocide of the Palestinian people accelerates, I am consumed by my helplessness to make any difference. My thoughts, too, have increasingly turned to the words of my most beloved poets. I wanted to share a couple of their poems that indict our silences, our complicity in atrocity. NB: Heaney reads only section III of his poem.
🔈THE CORRESPONDENT
Agha Shahid Ali
A Country Without a Post Office, 1997
I tell him he must never leave. He cites
the world: his schedule. I set up barricades:
the mountain routes are damp;
there, dead dervishes damascene
the dark. "I must leave now," his voice ablaze.
I take off—it's my last resort—my shadow.
And he walks—there's no electricity—
back into my dark, murmurs Kashmir!, lights
(to a soundtrack of exploding grenades)
a dim kerosene lamp.
"We must give back the hour it sheen.
or this spell will never end...Quick," he says,
"I've just come—with videos—from Sarajevo."
His footage is priceless with sympathy,
close-ups in slow motion, from bombed sites
to the dissolve of mosques in colonnades.
Then, wheelchairs on a ramp,
burning. He fast-forwards: the scene:
the sun: a man in formal wear: he plays
on the sidewalk his unaccompanied cello,
the hour turned, dusk-slowed, to Albinoni,
only the Adagio as funeral rites
before the stars dazzle, polished to blades
above a barbed-wire camp.
The cellist disappears. The screen
fills—first with soldiers, then the dead, their gaze
fractured white with subtitles. Whose echo
inhabits the night? The phone rings. I think he
will leave. I ask: "When will the satellites
transmit my songs, carry Kashmir, aubades
always for dawns to stamp
True! across seas?" The stars careen
down, the lamp dies. He hangs up. A haze
settles over us. He opens the window,
points to convoys in the mountains, army
trucks with dimmed lights. He wants exclusive rights
to this dream, its fused quartz of furtive shades.
He's been told to revamp
his stories, reincarnadine
their gloss. I light a candle. He'll erase
Bosnia, I feel. He will rewind to zero,
film from there a way back to his country,
bypassing graves than in blacks and whites
climb ever up the hills. The wax cascades
down the stand, silver clamp
to fasten this dream, end it unseen.
In the faltering light, he surveys
what's left. He zooms madly into my shadow.
🔈WHATEVER YOU SAY SAY NOTHING
Seamus Heaney
North, 1975
I.
I'm writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of 'views
On the Irish thing'. I'm back in winter
Quarters where bad news is no longer news,
Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads
As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who've scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and Sten,
Who proved upon their pulses 'escalate',
'Backlash' and 'crack down', 'the provisional wing',
'Polarization' and 'long-standing hate'.
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing,
Expertly civil-tongued with civil neighbours
On the high wires of first wireless reports,
Sucking the fake taste, the stony flavours
Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:
'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree.'
'Where's it going to end?' 'It's getting worse.'
'They're murderers.' 'Internment, understandably ...'
The 'voice of sanity' is getting hoarse.
II.
Men die at hand. In blasted street and home
The gelignite's a common sound effect:
As the man said when Celtic won, 'The Pope of Rome
's a happy man this night.' His flock suspect
In their deepest heart of hearts the heretic
Has come at last to heel and to the stake.
We tremble near the flames but want no truck
With the actual firing. We're on the make
As ever. Long sucking the hind tit
Cold as a witch's and as hard to swallow
Still leaves us fork-tongued and on the border bit:
The liberal papist note sounds hollow
When amplified and mixed in with the bangs
That shake all hearts and windows day and night.
(It's tempting here to rhyme on 'labour pangs'
And diagnose rebirth in our plight
But that would be to igmore other symptoms.
Last night you didn’t need a stethescope
To hear the eructation of Orange drums
Allergic equally to Pearce and Pope.)
On all sides 'little platoons' are mustering—
The phrase is Cruise O’Brien's via that great
Backlash, Burke—while I sit here with a pestering
Drouth for works at once both gaff and bait
To lure the tribal shoals to epigram
And order. I believe any of us
Could draw the line through bigotry and sham,
Given the right line, aere perennius.
III.
'Religion's never mentioned here,' of course.
'You know them by their eyes,' and hold your tongue.
'One side's as bad as the other,' never worse.
Christ, it's near time that some small leak was sprung
In the great dykes the Dutchman made
To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus.
Yet for all this art and sedentary trade
I am incapable. The famous
Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the 'wee six' I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule
That Norman, Ken and Sidney signalled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin'd and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.
IV.
This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees
Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was déjà-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.
Is there a life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.