What Is It Good For?

Scyros

Karl Shapiro

snuffle and sniff and handkerchief

The doctor punched my vein

The captain called me Cain

Upon my belly sat the sow of fear

With coins on either eye

The President came by

And whispered to the braids what none could hear

High over where the storm

Stood steadfast cruciform

The golden eagle sank in wounded wheels

White negroes laughing still

Crept fiercely on Brazil

Turning the navies upward on their keels

Now one by one the trees

Stripped to their naked knees

To dance up on the heaps of shrunken dead

The roof of England fell

Great Paris tolled her bell

And China staunched mer milk and wept for bread

No island singly lay

But lost its name that day

The Ainu dived across the plunging sands

From dawn to dawn to dawn

King George's birds came on

Strafing the tulips from his children's hands

Thus in the classic sea

Southeast from Thessaly

The dynamited mermen washed ashore

And tritons dresssed in steel

Trolled heads with rod and reel

Adn dredged potatoes from the Aegean floor

Hot is the sky and green

Where Germans have been seen

The moon leaks metal on the Atlantic fields

Pink boys in birthday shrouds

Loop lightly through the clouds

Or coast the peaks of Finland on their shields

That prophet year by year

Lay still but could not hear

Where scholars tapped to find his new remains

Gog and Magog ate pork

In vertical New York

And war began next Monday on the Danes




This is another one of the poems that first turned me on to poetry. It's about war, which is one of the earliest and greatest subjects for poetry to take on. 


Because most of the anthologies I had access to were from the '70s and '80s, there was a tendency to lionize the High Modernists at the expense of newer voices. I was under the impression that war poetry had its high water mark with WWI (Owen, Sassoon, Brooke), some great voices in WWII (Randall Jarell, Auden) and then soldiers stopped writing.


To put it crassly, World War II was an okay war for poetry but a great war for fiction with Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, The Naked and the Dead. But then Korea, Vietnam, Gulf Wars One and Two... Not so much for the written word, at least as public consciousness goes. Between M*A*S*H, Platoon, Three Kings - most of the fictitious representations are film or television. 


It's taken me until now to find great poems about all the conflicts in between. There's Yusuf Khomenyakaa's "Facing It," Brian Turner's collection "Here, Bullet," Charles Simic has written a lot about Boznia-Herzogovina. 


It's important to acknowledge the past masters and their contributions. But it's been a revelation to me that people are still writing great work about these subjects, that nobody gets to have the final say. There's always someone else to say something else.