Meditações - just as the pendulum of the world’s clocks returns its towns to craters

Consulting an Elder Poet on an Anti-War Poem

(for Elizabeth Bishop)

 

One day you said to me,

“there’s nothing you can do,”

and recited Auden’s line:

“Poetry makes nothing happen.”

Although I honor your pinched music,

the poems you dipped in light,

those pulsing like a rainbow

before slipping from our sight,

I wanted to ask you why

several dives out of the self,

a sweet woman’s open caress,

a hundred books with stories

gyrating with people and places

never diminished my confusion.

 

You did agree that at least

Old Socrates was right

in telling his Athenian friends

that governments are only that—

a person with many heads

that cannot think as one.

History will go on showing

them swing from peace

to war and back again,

in one wide gallows-sweep

just as the pendulum

of the world’s clocks

returns its towns to craters.

 

Fifteen cobalt-blue years later,

I must ask myself, if the dust

and rubble of each new war

that settles in our bones

and deadens a generation,

are little more than negatives

of the Kennedys, King and Lennon,

has less weight than what

we felt the day the Apollo spaceship

landed on the moon,

and Auden’s line is true,

then why did you til your last breath,

sing into your ruin?

Duane Niatum