Poets United Midweek Motif ~ War & Peace

“War does not determine who is right – only who is left” — Bertrand Russell

SOURCE

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality….I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” — Dr. Martin Luther King

       Midweek Motif ~War & Peace

The World War I (1914 – 1918) ended with the establishment of the League of Nations — with the aim to explore the possibilities how wars could be avoided.

            

Yet armed conflicts among nations continue and Peace remains elusive as ever, thanks to the belligerent nations. Life does not matter!!!!

Raise your voice in this context.

1914

by Wilfred Owen

War broke: and now the Winter of the world

With perishing great darkness closes in.

The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,

Is over all the width of Europe whirled,

Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled

Are all Art’s ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin

Famines of thought and feeling. Love’s wine’s thin.

The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,

And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,

An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,

A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.

But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need

Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.

Earth Is Frenzied With Fury

               (A Song)

 by Rabindranath Tagore

Earth is frenzied with fury; in constant vile conflict;

Awfully crooked its path; tangled in wily greed.

All sore souls pray for the new birth of a Savior

Save us O Great Life with Thine life giving words

Let bloom the love-lotus with ever flowing nectar

              

O the ever Serene, Free and Holy presence

Let your Mercy absolve Earth of its stains

O Generous One initiate onto the firm renouncing path

O Supreme Mendicant claim our ego as your alms

Let all forget their cares, woes; delusion be severed

Let knowledge as the radiant sun dawn in its splendor

Let all world gain life, the blind receive sight

O the ever Serene, Free and Holy presence

Let your Mercy absolve Earth of its stains

The grieving heart of Mankind is smoldering with agony

Worn out in treasure hunt the discontents are aggrieved

Lands far and wide flaunt their blood-tilak* of filth

Sound your conch of well being and bliss

Touching all with Thy right hand to bless

Play Thy auspicious tune to the rhythm of Grace

O the ever Serene, Free and Holy presence

Let your Mercy absolve Earth of its stains

                    Translated by Sumana Roy)

To All In The So Called Defence Industry

by Adrian Mitchell

Arms trade workers, here's an early warning 
You might wake up tomorrow morning 
And find that this is the glorious day 
When all your jobs will just melt away 
Because the people of the world are going to make sure 
There'll be no more, no more, no more war 
So now's the time to switch your occupation 
From dealing in death and desolation 
Don't hang around now you've been told 
The international murder trade's about to fold 
You won't have to maim, you won't have to kill, 
You can use your brain and use your skill. 
Peace needs workers of all kinds- 
Make artificial limbs instead of landmines. 
Tricycles instead of tridents, 
Violins instead of violence, 
Lifeboats, hospitals, medicine, drains, 
Food and toys and buses and trains- 
Come on, there's plenty of work to be done 
If we're going to make peace for everyone. 

                 

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                (Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~Independence)

The Living Dead

~ Honouring our poetic ancestors ~

Dulce Et Decorum Est 

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

(The Latin means, 'It is sweet and honourable to die for one's country'.)

It's just been Anzac Day here in Australia (and in New Zealand too). So at present I am particularly conscious of war and its aftermath. The Anzac Day tradition began as a commemoration of particular events in World War I. Wilfred Owen – who was not Australian but English – served in World War I and was killed shortly before it ended, at the age of 25. 

It's generally agreed that, as Poetry Foundation observes, he 'wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I.' The article goes on to say that Owen 

composed nearly all of his poems in slightly over a year, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice. Only five poems were published in his lifetime—three in the Nation and two that appeared anonymously in the Hydra, a journal he edited in 1917 when he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. 

Almost all his poems appeared posthumously, with the good graces of other poets: in particular his friend and sometime mentor Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, Edmund Blunden and C. Day Lewis.

Owen's experiences at the front made him anti-war, and a purposefully anti-war poet. He and Sassoon were both notable for writing realistic war poetry rather than patriotic pieces about honour and glory, as other war poets were doing at the time. In fact they wanted the war stopped, on the grounds that the only thing it could achieve was further suffering.

Today, opinion is not so polarised. Most of us don't think there's much glory in war, but with the hindsight of history we perceive some wars as having been unfortunately necessary. At least we haven't yet worked out what else to do when diplomacy and/or economic sanctions fail. 

Yesterday I watched a TV program in which a group of disabled veterans (both physically and mentally damaged from  their years of active service) answered anonymous questions – the sorts of things people are curious about but don't usually ask because it would be rude. They were very straightforward and honest in their answers. It emerged that, whatever their reasons for joining the military, all included the intention to help other people.

But when they were asked whether they thought war did any good, at first each of them said a regretful no. Then some admitted that in small ways they thought they had done some good in the particular time and place – but not long-term. In our era, the enemy is not in the opposite trenches; it is much more difficult to fight terrorists. And the veterans see, with regard to the very long engagements in places like Afghanistan, the gains they once helped make being eroded and reversed over time.

Though we haven't found the answer yet, it's good that we no longer glorify war, and important that it's never entered into lightly, or as anything but a last resort. Poems like this one of Wilfred Owen's have played their part in waking us up. (Today the TV news does a good job of it, too. We can't remain ignorant.)

That wasn't Owen's only importance as a poet, though. He was also technically innovative for his time (in ways that he himself doesn't seem to have appreciated fully, though his peers did) e.g in his use of slant rhyme. We, who do all sorts of things that once would not have been considered poetry, probably owe him a debt (along with others whose experiments we're more aware of). I'll quote Poetry Foundation again (same link) for more detail:

Sassoon called “Strange Meeting” Owen’s masterpiece, the finest elegy by a soldier who fought in World War I. T.S. Eliot, who praised it as “one of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by the war,” recognized that its emotional power lies in Owen’s “technical achievement of great originality.” In “Strange Meeting,” Owen sustains the dreamlike quality by a complex musical pattern, which unifies the poem and leads to an overwhelming sense of war’s waste and a sense of pity that such conditions should continue to exist. John Middleton Murry in 1920 noted the extreme subtlety in Owen’s use of couplets employing assonance and dissonance. Most readers, he said, assumed the poem was in blank verse but wondered why the sound of the words produced in them a cumulative sadness and inexorable uneasiness and why such effects lingered. Owen’s use of slant-rhyme produces, in Murry’s words, a “subterranean ... forged unity, a welded, inexorable massiveness.”

'Strange Meeting' is probably Owen's best-known poem. For those who haven't encountered it yet and are now curious, it's here.

And you can find others at PoemHunter. (Just remember to turn off the sound, so as not to get the awful, mechanical voice they use on that site.)

There is also his author page at Amazon, which includes a volume of 'Selected Letters'. I remember hearing, years ago, on a TV program about war, a letter read out which had been written from a young World War I soldier to his mother. It was so beautifully (albeit simply) worded, I said to my husband, 'That was written by a poet!' And sure enough, it turned out to be one of Owen's letters home.

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Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Music

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”—Plato

Source

               Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Music

“Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid…
And every single time,
the happiness in the tune convinces me that I’m not afraid.”

                 

This is how Rodgers and Hammerstein lyrics illustrate wonders of Music.

What is this life with no rhythm, melodies or harmonies?

Music itself is a universal language connecting all and Music is everywhere. We only need to lend our ears to SEE music!

Music is our motif today. You might also focus on any musical instrument, any special song or composer.

Music Swims Back To Me

By Anne Sexton

Wait Mister. Which way is home? 
They turned the light out
and the dark is moving in the corner.
There are no sign posts in this room, 
four ladies, over eighty, 
in diapers every one of them.
La la la, Oh music swims back to me
and I can feel the tune they played
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.

Imagine it. A radio playing
and everyone here was crazy.
I liked it and danced in a circle.
Music pours over the sense
and in a funny way
music sees more than I.
I mean it remembers better; 
remembers the first night here.
It was the strangled cold of November; 
even the stars were strapped in the sky
and that moon too bright
forking through the bars to stick me
with a singing in the head.
I have forgotten all the rest.

They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.
and there are no signs to tell the way, 
just the radio beating to itself
and the song that remembers
more than I. Oh, la la la, 
this music swims back to me.
The night I came I danced a circle
and was not afraid.
Mister? 

I Know The Music

By Wilfred Owen

All sounds have been as music to my listening:
Pacific lamentations of slow bells,
The crunch of boots on blue snow rosy-glistening,
Shuffle of autumn leaves; and all farewells:

Bugles that sadden all the evening air,
And country bells clamouring their last appeals
Before [the] music of the evening prayer;
Bridges, sonorous under carriage wheels.

Gurgle of sluicing surge through hollow rocks,
The gluttonous lapping of the waves on weeds,
Whisper of grass; the myriad-tinkling flocks,
The warbling drawl of flutes and shepherds' reeds.

The orchestral noises of October nights
Blowing ( ) symphonetic storms
Of startled clarions ( )
Drums, rumbling and rolling thunderous and ( ).

Thrilling of throstles in the keen blue dawn,
Bees fumbling and fuming over sainfoin-fields. 

 Music When Soft Voices Die

 By P. B. Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on. 

Music

By Rainer Maria Rilke

Take me by the hand;
it's so easy for you, Angel,
for you are the road
even while being immobile.

You see, I'm scared no one
here will look for me again;
I couldn't make use of
whatever was given,

so they abandoned me.
At first the solitude
charmed me like a prelude,
but so much music wounded me.


(Translated by A. Poulin) 

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

               ( Susan’s Midweek Motif on 01/04/2017 will be ~ Vision)