Memories of Poetry and War

Memories of Poetry and War"

Some nights in Viet Nam, when I stood alone
on the top of a bunker staring out into a night
that contained armies at war,
armies made up of small groups of men
searching for each other, lying in wait,
trip wires and claymores, M-16s and AK-47s,
I would see a red cluster of flares
shoot into the sky followed, frequently, by slowly
parachuting amber flares that lit the dark...
soft light reflected on piles of hand grenades,
belts of fifty caliber ammunition for the big machine gun,
smaller belts for the M-60, huge cartridges for
the M-79 grenade launcher, lighting me wearing
Army greens, flak jacket, camouflage boots, helmet.

During those times, letting the two other men,
asleep in the bunker, rest, thinking that an attack
might be imminent, my eyes would drift over the perimeter,
looking for any trace of movement out of the
ordinary. What came to my mind then, what I whispered
into the dark, was poetry that I had memorized long before;
mostly, I confess, poetry about leaving such places.
As the sky lit up at night, I would whisper from Yeats,
"I will arise and go now and go to Inisfree..." or
from Eliot, "Let us go then, you and I /
when the evening is spread
out against the sky / like a patient etherized
upon a table."

Somewhere off in the distance,
I might hear a fire fight near where I had seen
the red cluster flare; and Hardy's "Convergence of the
Twain" would breathe out from me.
There was great consolation in poetry,
Innisfree almost becoming a mantra.

In those days, not writing, I lived poetry,
sucking it in and blowing it out. In Dak To,
when I listened to my radio, heard a boy
named Bao report on American convoys leaving the camp
for Pleiku and heard the jets strafe and napalm
his position, the poetry that is Yeats
and the poetry that is Stevens (O blessed rage for order,
pale Ramon!) mingled with red dust and death.

I can remember still, through something of a red haze,
getting absurdly drunk on a fifth of ruffino's chianti
(the club was out of scotch and all other drinks)
and wandering down to the perimeter. I climbed up
on the berm and looked out at the valley and the hills,
Eben Flood had nothing on me that evening; and I held
the remains of the bottle in my hand,
seeing only one moon,
and out Heroded Herod in declaiming
the opening lines from Shakespeare's Henry V,
snarling the words,
"And at his heels leashed in like hounds, should famine,
sword and fire crouch for employment!"
and moving on to "Once more onto the breach, dear friends,
once more / or close up the wall with our English
dead!!"

And then moving to Hamlet and the first great soliloquy,
"Oh that this too too solid flesh / would melt,
thaw and resolve itself into a dew /
or that the Almighty had not fixed his canon gainst
self-slaughter."

I remember all the details of the Shakespearean
soliloquys and the poems I sang into a drunk night
during the Tet Offensive of 1968,
but I remember none of the generalities.


H. Palmer Hall


Posted over on Palmer's Poems
Orig. Pub.: Texas Writers Newsletter. Fall, 1995