Poetry Wednesday: The Navigator Falling
Those are the Alps, those the thin banks
Of cirrus we skirted, and there, in the whorl,
Afflicted, like me, by a wicked momentum,
Plummets the flotsam of what was my fortress –
There the right wing, its rivets unbound
Where it cracked from the fuselage, riddled and fissured;
Flayed by the flak and the spit of the fighters;
There the tail end, where faithful by force,
Confined by his Brownings, Davey goes down,
Screams to a death both sudden and slow;
And now, as I gather, patched through the glen,
The town that we targeted yawns at the sun –
Tyrolean Innsbruck. Still, the massed bombs
Perch fat in their pay-loads; still their combustion
Seethes in the cylinders primed for descent;
So the boys in their loden leap in their games,
Scuffle and run in the shade of the steeple,
The walls of the Hofkirche, august and white.
Blithe, they imbibe the air of the Bremen
Brushed with the pine-trees tufting its course,
The cornflower, the aster suddenly sprung;
And their mothers by, fondly, marshal their play,
As kin out of memory, gathered and gossiping,
Did in their day when the summers were still.
And none of these folk – not the boys, nor their mothers,
Catches the drone of our low formation,
Knows that in moments their play will be shattered,
The breeze from the mountains turned to a death-gale
After the thermite and phosphorus catch.
Then the air will die; the boys with a stare
Suck the vacuity, desperate to taste
One failing iota of oxygen in it;
And these are the fortunate, those who expire
Unclawed by the fires that rave and predate,
Whose still developing muscles and bones
Are not the oblation of men to their wrath,
Nor are they those who scrunch in a bunker,
Screaming with every bomb that explodes,
Imbuing the slab when the mothers who clutch them
Knife their gracile wrists in despair.
And how could I guess, when in Lincoln, a boy,
I ran to the river with Edward to fish,
And Anthony, lugging his old tackle-box,
And Landon and Will, uncomfortable brothers;
How could I know, as we lazed by the eddies,
Jesting and japing in puerile accord,
How fate, in its whims, would bear me aloft
In no great span, to raze and dissolve
Whole cities of boys, who relished their prime
And the thrill of its motions, even as we did,
Laved by the light of the wavering waters?
How could I gather, with such a boy’s mind
That a bass on the line, convulsed in the catch,
Compelled me to mercy, how, in the end
The training of war would callous my thoughts
To more than the act – the assent to the act?
This morning, dozing under the tail,
While waiting our flight – its pains – on the tarmac,
Dreams of a monster troubled the cold –
Half-man, half-pithecine, stooped at a stone,
Smashing out piles of flakes for rough blades,
While far on the plain, the dusty savannah,
The beasts of a rival clade did the same,
Blank rage in their eyes, and the redness of lust
For the battle to come; and when, from the din
Of their fancied arsenals, sudden and stunned
I woke from the past, the shade of our plane
Loomed over my vision, girt with its guns
And the bombs in its belly; laden with death,
A city destroyer, strong to defy
The pull of the earth and the spirit alike,
With fire for wings, and iron at heart –
All this from the force of stone upon stone.
And what am I, in the wisp of my will,
My brief atomity, that I might staunch
The wounds of a violence meant out of time?
What can I make of the evil accretions
Epochs have added, if, when I strive,
The crud of their instincts clings to my arm?
And what would it matter, given the eons –
Given the ineluctable fall –
If I sat and reflected, limning in mind
The effects, as they were, of all of my missions –
The heads half-severed, legs sheered off,
The infants dying charred and alone?
What would it matter to say I repent –
To truly repent – if the conflict goes on,
Power after power, till time is no more?
Those are the mountains, those the bald crags,
That the evergreen tree line; those thin skeins
Are either the hearths of the natives at rest,
Or my friends in the wreckage. Nothing for me
Has gone well or gone true since I took to the air,
And now I am here. So many blind forces
Fling me about, I have lost my soul
Somewhere in the clouds. I remember a time
The blood of my hands would have blanched at such work.
I must strive, if I live, to consider these changes,
And find what they mean in the end – if I live.