heroes and villians

Long time since last post, all has sorted itself out. Elizabeth is proving excellent for me and really encouraging me to believe in my own inner knowing, the following from her last email made me cheer and applaud!

Remember when you are being 'workshopped' to not be too influenced by comments that may be helpful or not. Remember you hold the key to the poem, know its origins. And poetry doesn't have to explain itself.

Have only written one poem during the break. Tried to work yesterday there are a couple of poems swirling round in my head but not coming out at present.



Right reading have just finished two books both amazing testaments to the resilience of the human spirit. The first Shake hands with the Devil by Lt Colnel Romeo Daillaire a Canadian who headed up the 1994 peace keeping mission in Rwanda and had to watch the slaughter as the UN and the world turned a their backs and did nothing to stop the genocide; the swiftest in history killed 1 million Rwandans in 100 days by machete wielding militias. Husbands killed wives, teachers their students. This man went through hell as he watched the wholesale slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The title of the book refers to Daillaires meeting with leaders of the militias doing the killing to try and negotiate refugee swaps and shaking hands with these devils and seeing dried blood on their hands and shirts. These men weren't just planning the slaughter they were actively engaged in the killing.Although the UN effectively tied his hands allowing him and his pitifully small force to take no direct or confrontational action to stop the killing, he none the less saved 1000's of lives by ignoring the supposed mandate of his mission.

After returning from this mission understandably he was suffering from severe PTSD and twice attempted suicide. In the face of all he had done he blamed himself for the failure of his mission.

Today after extensive therapy and support from family he is finally learning to deal with horror that he lived through. Daillaire is now a Canadian senator and works in programmes for children affected by trauma in war. He has become an advocate for those the world has deemed as having no strategic value and has testified at genocide trials of Rwanda. A true hero in my book. One thing that I found amazing that Daillaire a devout Catholic never lost his faith in God. He said having looked into the eyes of the Devil he knew that an opposing force for good must be a reality.



The second book was Ghost Rider: Travels on the healing road. This book is by another Canadian Neal Peart the drummer of Rush. Like Dalliare, Neal was traumatised by loss. Within a ten month period, he suffered family losses so devastating they left him a ghost(the death of his daughter in a car accident and his wife with cancer) - physically a man but with nothing. No hope, meaning, no desire to keep living. One year after the first tragedy Neil was choosing between life and his own death. Finally all he could decide upon was motion. He got on his BMW motorcycle, and over the next 14 months rode 55,000 miles searching for a reason to live.

Both these men were able to find a road back to themselves, those selves may not have been the same as before their trauma but they were able to create new ways of living in the world.
I guess that has been my experience of healing from trauma; you cannot unravel the rug to take out the 'mistake' you can only keep weaving and create something new based on that 'mistake' and that 'error' makes the rug unique. Whatever is created is built on the fire of pain.

Resilience and finding healing is done in many different ways and what my reading and exploration have shown me so far is that the human spirit heals itself in its own way in its own time. For some the journey is just impossible and they fall by the wayside, but a large percentage choose life. A hard choice, I know I have been there.



Poetry wise have been reading Here, Bullet by Brian Turner an MFA from the University of Oregon who served as an Infantry team leader for a year tour of Duty in Iraq. The work is powerful direct and full of arresting images, that linger long after you have put the book aside.

My favourite from this collection:



9 Line Medevac



Medevac Line 1: Location of pick up site?

Any sheriff in Baghdad, any Sheriff in Baghdad I say into the radio handmic, my hands shaking with adrenaline and stress and dehydration. I give a ten digit grid for this exact spot on the earth's surface, the west side of Baghdad, the highway 1 interchange we've renamed Route Victor, fifty metres north of the overpass, on the shoulder there, that's where they are, there in the dirt and wreckage, surrounded by tiered buildings with balconies crowded by the curious onlookers tragedy always lures in, and I can name this spot, but cannot make it real, cannot give it the crackling stress of the air here, how heavy and charged it is, or the smell of trash fires drifting noxious and sweet, or the position of the gibbons moon overhead, too eager for night as the sun is still slowed by the horizon at dusk, too eager to romanticize this land and maybe even what's happening, though there's nothing romantic about this, unless pain and heat and blood and a grown man pissing in his pants with fear are romantic, all of this and more is where we are, the clock stopped here, the day as yet unfinished, blood smeared on my forehead -



Medevac line 2: Radio frequency -Call sign-Requesting unit?

I tell him the frequency though I am hearing everyone around the site now, Sergent's yelling for Stretchers, goddammit I said get a goddamned stretcher and a spine board now, and each voice is edged with the urgent pulse of the larynx, the vocal cords roughened by the lungs, I tell the Sheriff my call- sign is Ghost 1-3 Alpha, which is like telling him he speaks with the dead, and that the dead wish for his help, that the dead wait for him in Baghdad on asphalt spread out flat as a river of oil fuming-



Medevac line 3: Number of patients by precedence?

I tell him Two, two patients urgent surgical, though that doesn't really tell him that Sgt. Randholp has four children and can't die here, his wife wouldn't allow it if she knew, and if she knew the shock of it snapped his head back and threw him down into the vehicle's troop compartment, if she knew that she would fall to her knees, her ears would shut out the noise of the world to complete silence, that's how urgent this is, the Sheriff of Baghdad doesn't know Specialist Mundy has a chunk of shrapnel in his neck, just under the skin, and he's bleeding horribly, his eyes gone from black to washed-out gray, the purple heart they will be given for this is an award that no one wants-



Medevac line 4: At least give me line 4 so I can get a bird in the air, alright Soldier? Special equipment required?

Special equipment? Hoists? Ventilators? How do I know what will save them? Blood. Bring them blood, especially for Mundy, because there is more blood than I have ever seen before, spilled all over the vehicle seats and the ramp, and my shirt, my hands, wiped onto my scalp, so much blood but I don't know what type, and send the best surgeon that there is, someone who knows more than the mechanics of the body, someone who knows how to treat that drifting of the mind into fizzling lights, how the mind seems to disappear into the skull's stratosphere of bone, untethered, rising to where the world ends, that edge, bring a doctor who can bring them back from there, and quick-



Medevac line 5: Number of patients by type?

Which makes me pause knowing they are litter patients and cannot walk, but the pause is a great concern- to classify them forces me to admit I do not know these men I have worked beside, one I know has a bronze star for going into a mine field, and the other I know only as being a shy and quiet one, maybe twenty-



Medevac line 6: Security?

Look around. Know one knows who the enemy is. All of it looks like Thursday evening on a freeway cutting through town, wedding parties passing by firing AK 47s into the air, everything is possible here, everything...



Medevac line 7: Method of marking the site?

The Sheriff of Baghdad needs to know -A smoke signal? An orange panel? How best do you mark a place of loss and pain? This is hallowed earth, and if one of them should die here-
Flowers? Stones? Will it have mourners dressed in black to stand by the roadside as boots and rifles are buried under the roadbed? Will it have angels to watch over Mundy who believes in them?



Medevac line 8: Patient nationality?

If they die here what will it matter? The plains of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, this land of confluence and heat will become their nation, and even if they live, it will be theirs as well - the land that tested their souls and changed them-



Medevac line 9: Son, tell me the terrain, that's all we need and we'll be there for you

The land is what I need, soil ground into the heels of my palms, cranebreaks in the canals, water buffalo up to their shoulders in dark water, the wind that brings dust so thick it pales the sun dim as daylight moonlight, this land flat and hard, where sunflower fields grow thick with yellow heads hung down in respect for the losses being given and received, here where the Blackhawk flares down in a cloud of dust in the rotorwash I run into with Sgt. Randolphs stretcher, a soldier who will never be the same.



After the horrible last day of last term I bought myself two new poetry books, while others were gorging on chocolate for Easter I would gorge on poetry. The first I bought was The Door a collection of new poems from Margaret Atwood. Her poems are direct but also have a mystical kind of realism which I find compelling. It reminds me of the South American writers, Isabele Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez . One of my favourites from the collection:

War Photo

The dead women thrown on the dusty road
is very beautiful.
One leg extended, the other flexed, foot pointed
toward the knee, the arm flung overhead, the hand
relaxed into a lovely gesture
a dancer might study for years
and never attain.
Her purple robe is shaped
as it is fluttering;
her head is turned away.

There are other dead people scattered around
like trees blown over,
left in the wake of frightened men
battering there way to some huge purpose
they can't now exactly remember,

But it's this beautiful woman that holds me,
dancing there on the ground
with such perfection.

Oh dead beautiful woman, if anyone
had the power to wrench me through despair
and arid helplessness
into the heart of prayer
it would be you-

Instead I will make for you
the only thing I can:
although I'll never know your name,
I won't ever forget you.
Look: on the dusty ground
under my hand, on this cheap grey paper,
I am placing a small stone, here:
O

I really like the way Atwood uses her line breaks, to keep us wanting to move through the poem, this is something I think I need to work on to make the line breaks more dynamic.

The other book I bought was Sailing alone around the Room New and selected poems by Billy Collins. It was nice to get a collection of Collins work, with old favourites and some new work.
I love the ordinaryness of his poems. His imagery is very precise and this makes the poems very alive. Really liked this one

Dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumberance-
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate and a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she didn't shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self containment she would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she was not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

Had planned to read some fiction over the holiday but didn't manage it and I missed my classic for the holidays so will be reading next The Count of Monte Cristo and perhaps also Love in the Time of Cholera