Peace

The candle lit for peace flickers
I can feel rain on my cheeks

Paula Green

How to mark ANZAC Day on Poetry Shelf when I want to stand on the street with a placard saying PEACE in one hand and a placard saying CEASEFIRE in the other. When I want to pause in this sweet haven in which I live, with its abundance of bush and birds, vegetables and water. When each day delivers small miracles of joy and delight.

And yet each day carries me to the inhumanity of Gaza, the infinite despair, brutality and violence of this godforsaken and utterly unnecessary war. Of all wars, past and present. Local and global. Today I am grateful for all the historians and journalists, fiction writers and poets, documentary and film makers who have exposed the travesty and horror of wars.

So today, I return to the haunting and insistent pain of Bill Manhire’s ‘My World War I Poem’, a poem I have returned to often, with its hope and its aching repetitions. I am reminded, with this poem haunting, of incalculable loss and suffering, of terror and agony and heartbreak. On each occasion of reading, a moment to mourn.

Bill directed me to Keith Sinclair’s ‘The Bomb is Made’, and it felt so very fitting, with its ominous over-and-undercurrents of threat, a finger pausing over the weapon, and the sweet startle of the final word with its semantic ripples. The poem is a repository of repetition, on this occasion both form and subject driven, where for me, the past is fingertapping the present. Again the reading triggers the mourning.

I have included the elegiac voice of Robert Sullivan. In his collection Cassino: City of Martys / Cittā Martire, Robert travels to Italy, to the place his grandfather and so many others battled during World War Two. He travels with a knotty braid of war memories, burial caves, cemeteries, family grief, drawing upon Hone Tuwhare, Dante, Ezra Pound, home soil, whānau. Again the poem, and indeed the entire collection, haunts. Again the reading becomes mourning.

Next Sue Wootton’s ‘War baby’. Again it clings to me long after I finish reading. The notion of concertina time squeezing in and out, the ripple implications and effects of war, it is like my heart is squeezing out melancholic music, a prolonged pain.

I finish with a poem I wrote for my dear sister in law, as we struggled to cope with the tragic news flooding in from Gaza, a poem that is still active in its motivation, an inhumane tragedy that I think of every day at dawn.

Let us work and write and record together for peace.

Five poems for ANZAC Day

MY WORLD WAR I POEM 

Inside each trench, the sound of prayer. 
Inside each prayer, the sound of digging.

Bill Manhire, from Some things to Place inside a Coffin, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2017

THE BOMB IS MADE

The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto.
Be kind to one another, kiss a little
And let love-making imperceptibly
Grow inwards from a kiss. I’ve done with soldiering,
Though every day my leave-pass may expire.

The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto.
The cell of death is formed that multiplied
Will occupy the lung, exclude the air
Be kind to one another, kiss a little –
The first goodbye might each day last forever.

The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto.
The hand is born that gropes to press the button.
The prodigal grey generals conspire
To dissipate the birth-right of the Asians.
Be kind to one another, kiss a little.

The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto.
The plane that takes off persons in a hurry
Is only metaphorically leaving town,
So if we linger we will be on time.
Be kind to one another, kiss a little.

The bomb is made will drop on Rangitoto.
I do not want to see that sun-burned harbour,
Islandless as moon, red-skied again,
Its tide unblossomed, sifting wastes of ash.
Be kind to one another, kiss a little,
Our only weapon is this gentleness.

Keith Sinclair, from Moontalk: Poems New and Selected, Auckland University Press 1993

xxxviii. Songs

Singing through the flashes and tracer fire
singing through the bombs and roaring propellers
singing for the Shermans crossing the Bailey bridges
singing the Māori Battalion song
singing of the farms and the whānau
singing out praise for their country
singing like Orpheus so the rocks and trees followed them
from home

Robert Sullivan, from Cassino: City of Martys / Cittā Martire, Huia Publishers, 2010

War baby

War’s rationing and war’s dread live on behind
the fruit bowl and the hogget and the bread. Time’s
a concertina with doodlebugs and sirens in its pleats,
and when it’s squeezed it folds her in too tight:
it requisitions happiness; carpet-bombs delights.

Sue Wootton, from By Birdlight, Steele Roberts, 2011

Speak the Mountain

for dear Banu

There is a mountain
There is a river
There is a lake

Hold the weeping child to heart
Hold the thirsty and the wounded to heart
Hold the dead and the fearful also to heart
Hold the rubble home and the broken bones

We speak the despairing mountain
We speak the blood river
We speak the grief lake

Marching peace
Marching heart
Marching out

There is a mountain
There is a river
There is a lake

Paula Green, 2024