poetry lamenting war #5
Mar. 24th, 2003 06:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThe Interrogation
Two streams: one dry, one poured all night by our beds.
I'll wonder
about neither.
The dry one was clogged with bodies.
I'm through
with memory.
At which window of what house did light teach you tedium?
On which step of whose stairway did you learn indecision?
I'm through
sorting avenues and doors,
curating houses and deaths.
Which house did we flee by night? Which house did we flee by day?
Don't ask me.
We stood and watched one burn; from one we ran away.
I'm neatly folding
the nights and days, notes
to be forgotten.
We were diminished. We were not spared. There was no pity.
Neither was their sanctuary. Neither rest.
There were fires in the streets. We stood among men, at the level
of their hands, all those wrists, dead or soon to die.
No more
letting my survival
depend on memory.
There was the sea; its green volume brought despair.
There was waiting, there was leaving. There was
astonishment too. The astonishment of
"I thought you died!" "How did you get out?"
"And Little Fei Fei walked right by the guards!"
I grow
leaden with stories,
my son's eyelids
grow heavy.
Who rowed the boat when our father tired?
Don't ask me.
Who came along? Who got left behind?
Ask the sea.
Through it all there was no song, and weeping
came many years later.
I'm through with memory.
Sometimes a song,
even when there was weeping.
I'm through with memory.
Can't you still smell the smoke on my body?
--Li-Young Lee, The City in which I Love You. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 1990.
LINKS:
The Academy of American Poets again: brief (and fairly colorless) biography.
This page (courtesy of Art and Culture) has a discussion of Lee's poetry along with a list of links.
Bad layout and worse punctuation, but lots of information and pictures (apparently Li-Young Lee's brother is an artist), so, you pays your money and you takes your choice.
NOTE:
It may be stretching things slightly, historiographically speaking, to call this, or any other of Lee's poems "poetry lamenting war," depending on how one wants to define "war" (another poem in The City in which I Love You, looking back to these same experiences, says:
And to me, regardless of semantics, that's war.) I'm thinking about the people displaced, dispossessed, unnoticed, destroyed in the power struggle between Hussein and Bush. And so I post this poem.
Two streams: one dry, one poured all night by our beds.
I'll wonder
about neither.
The dry one was clogged with bodies.
I'm through
with memory.
At which window of what house did light teach you tedium?
On which step of whose stairway did you learn indecision?
I'm through
sorting avenues and doors,
curating houses and deaths.
Which house did we flee by night? Which house did we flee by day?
Don't ask me.
We stood and watched one burn; from one we ran away.
I'm neatly folding
the nights and days, notes
to be forgotten.
We were diminished. We were not spared. There was no pity.
Neither was their sanctuary. Neither rest.
There were fires in the streets. We stood among men, at the level
of their hands, all those wrists, dead or soon to die.
No more
letting my survival
depend on memory.
There was the sea; its green volume brought despair.
There was waiting, there was leaving. There was
astonishment too. The astonishment of
"I thought you died!" "How did you get out?"
"And Little Fei Fei walked right by the guards!"
I grow
leaden with stories,
my son's eyelids
grow heavy.
Who rowed the boat when our father tired?
Don't ask me.
Who came along? Who got left behind?
Ask the sea.
Through it all there was no song, and weeping
came many years later.
I'm through with memory.
Sometimes a song,
even when there was weeping.
I'm through with memory.
Can't you still smell the smoke on my body?
--Li-Young Lee, The City in which I Love You. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 1990.
LINKS:
The Academy of American Poets again: brief (and fairly colorless) biography.
This page (courtesy of Art and Culture) has a discussion of Lee's poetry along with a list of links.
Bad layout and worse punctuation, but lots of information and pictures (apparently Li-Young Lee's brother is an artist), so, you pays your money and you takes your choice.
NOTE:
It may be stretching things slightly, historiographically speaking, to call this, or any other of Lee's poems "poetry lamenting war," depending on how one wants to define "war" (another poem in The City in which I Love You, looking back to these same experiences, says:
It was one year of fire
out of the world's diary of fires,
flesh-laced, mid-century fire,
teeth and hair infested,
napalm-dressed and skull-hung fire,
and imminent fire, an elected
fire come to rob me
of my own death, my damp bed
in the noisy earth,
my rocking toward a hymn-like night.
(Lee, "Furious Versions" 3, p. 18)
And to me, regardless of semantics, that's war.) I'm thinking about the people displaced, dispossessed, unnoticed, destroyed in the power struggle between Hussein and Bush. And so I post this poem.
