A Salvo from the Ghetto
What’s a poet’s duty in times of war?
And I wonder how I will say it —
Did I save you from the crazed
vicissitudes of this world, or objects
in the mind you failed to recognise
as separate from yourself?
For there is only this understanding
yet it’s still a long way off, like a dream
your fingers unspool, can no longer catch
or tin cans that slip downstream
landing washed up on the soiled
beaches of your youth
You said you didn’t know me when
push came to shove, terrified of a blinking
patriarchy & its disavowal of the world
how cowards take a foreskin &
wrap it round themselves,
sensitivity blunted with rusting ideas
again doled out on an unsuspecting public
poor white trash or heady intellectual—
no matter, they don’t see the war
So many Peters, so many Pauls
What will you say when asked why you
didn’t speak up? I had to keep my job?
I chose expediency, danced like a marionette?
History has a place for all of us, even a
reckoning. The poet’s fear was that he would
‘be counted among the helpers of death’
& that his many contradictions would be
forever haunted by those who died in WW2
never hearing the good news.
‘To live with one’s own cowardice is bitter,’
writes Milosz, while those he knew were
martyred, yet what spilled from him were words
we need, should never be without.
‘What is poetry which does not save nations
or people?’ he writes, warning against
‘connivance with official lies’.
Will any of us say it better — I think not.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
