Heroes

Fearful eyes looked upwards at the thousands of arrows streaking

across the sky, the sun playing its reflective rays on those deadly

tips.

The targets for those shafts of death held their wooden shields aloft

as the prayers flowed freely from their lips.

The lucky ones died instantly, wooden missiles smashing through their

bodies, splintering bone, and piercing their racing hearts.

Screams from the wounded, hard to ignore as the arrows stopped them

playing their valiant parts.

The vanquished were fearful of the expected slaughter, which they

understood would be their fate.

Victors hacked and slashed at their beaten foe, spilling their blood,

just to satisfy their hate.

Looting and burning, soaked in enemy blood, they sang songs of triumph

at the death of their foe.

On the return to their homeland, every one of the valiant men

would be hailed as a returning hero.

 

Frightening sound of an explosion, the fortress demolished, iron

projectiles smash into its walls.

Men defended their stronghold bravely, but arrows were no match for

the power of the cannon ball.

When sturdy walls were reduced to rubble, the defending army took up

their swords and defiantly they charged.

They hoped that this new enemy would lose their courage and retreat,

but it was them that were stopped at a distance of four hundred yards.

The enemy had new weapons, in the form of muskets that spat out deadly

and unseen lead balls.

The defending brave men carried on their charge, then in great numbers

they began to fall.

The smoke had cleared, the roar of the guns had ceased, the valiant

army looted the bodies of their foes,

Then sang songs of victory and cheered each other knowing they would

be hailed as returning heroes.

 

They will never know what happened, it would make no difference even

if they did.

They will hear no sound, or sight of the enemy that is to destroy

those who were content just to love and live.

Husbands, wives, parents; children, lovers, animals, birds and sweet

smelling flowers reduced to ashes by the unholy rain.

Unlucky survivors will be condemned to live their pitiful lives,

mutilated and in terrible pain.

Towns, cities and countries will have very few left to cry, or to

morn.

Ill fated offspring of those few will suffer unknown terrors as they

begin to die, from the moment they are born.

The senders of these weapons of Hell from hundreds of miles away will

be uncaring as the life’s blood of millions, instantly ceases to flow.

They will stand upright and proud, as medals are pinned on the chests,

of these valiant vanquishing heroes.

Colin R. Beckford
2009

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Tatiana Retivov

Two poems sent to this website in 2007(!), introduced by the author.

Greetings,
Enclosed are two war poems, the first one has to do with Kosovo, and I meant  to dedicate it to Charles Simic, but I don't know him. I think I tried to send it to him back in the 90's and never got a response, so I guess he didn't like it. Perhaps what prompted the poem was some essay he wrote about  whether or not to return to Serbia. The second poem was generally written  about the war in Afghanistan, the old one, not the current one. Though I  stuck the image of "Homeric" waves in it, not exactly appropriate in terms  of terrain. In any case it goes way back to the early 80's.

I just saw you  on CNN, and was prompted to send these of to you.
I am a Russian and American poet, I write in both languages. Was born in New York, am currently living in Ukraine. 

Best Regards,
Tatiana Retivov

ENTREATED BY ATHENA

Stealing his swift-footed way
among the rubble and desecration
unleashed by "the blood-dimmed tide,"

the Poet returns, at best
as unobserved as Telemachus,
well-hidden behind his own

ancestral maps of disenchantment:
A weary refusal to bear witness.
Hark, he says, this teller of tales

none too psychopompous, let the cuckoo
bewail her lament through the hazelwood,
I have no wind left for winged words.

For the falcon has flown already
numerous star-crossed messages
from one end of the bridge to the other,

until only a medieval spectre loomed
between time and space, a yawning gap
now festering like an abscessed tooth.

Meanwhile, the epic yarn of Serbia
drags like some broken record
sparks flying with mortar, the current

formulas of a third war.
(What's so third about it is
unutterable, with or without gusli.)

Which is why the Poet must always return
come winter, with anima in tow--
to be held voluntarily captive

by a southeast village that imbibes nightly
a mountain of hoarfrost, exhaling prophecies--
to rewrite its charmed future in song.

Tatiana Retivov

 

RETREAT

It is the hour of rest in the City of Ruin.
Birdlike, the wary retinue
scans the wind-swept plain
until, ears cocked homeward,
their warrior profiles freeze:
Slavic coins minted
in their avengers' eyes.

And oh how the barley-bearing earth groans
under such arsenal of arms.
There, over yonder,
in the midday sun,
shimmering helms
haphazardly assemble
in mourning for their owners.

Such winged words have been hurled
though they cannot convey the silence
of landscape after battle.
For it is then that the mystery
of Homer's purple waves
is revealed as the color
of bleeding aquamarine.

Tatiana Retivov

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A poem from Israel. Information about the poet follows the poem.

The Barrier Crasher

For Ali Yichya, my teacher on being appointed ambassador to Athens

 
At this dusky hour, at the foot of Mount Gilboa
when I am dressed in drab against my will
to join the guards of the roadblock
(the Jalama border crossing, at times a roadblock, at times
a road ascending from the Afula Valley to the Dotan Valley
and to the road of the mountain and the fathers)
at this hour I think of you Ali Yichya
how you came all warm and paunchy rolling to us,
little settler-children of Sabia and Thamania in the land of waking Samaria,
the dancing gutturals
of the language of Hada’d.

At this dusky hour your people are returning, Ali, the people that are in the fields
and I stand in their way, with all the security checks
and those gutturals that came then to our little mouths
Return searching for a language.

At this dusky hour almost anything is possible
when my heart sings Arabic and goes out to the woman
whose onions have spilled out of her sack all over the place
and how in her proud silence she collects them whispering
one of the songs
that you taught us Ali Yichya from Kara Village in the virgin Elkana
which is being built
[and I didn’t know that you and your village have roots in our hills
that your ancestral mound which was deserted on an el-juma day
miten snin ago (they found in the mound a pot of meat and bones left on the coals)
near enough to be seen by us] 

at this dusky hour I see you Ali Yichya
carrying the prayer shawl flag
in the heights where the Greek gods of the Acropolis dwell
and how in an excited-Arab-soul all my cuts are healed
in the one soul

here at the roadblock silence descends now
and only the gold skin-of-gathered-onions still broadcasts a smell
that song and the smell
of the embarrassment of the woman and the soldier standing over her
(meaning me)
and ana mushtak- lak ya sid Ali

At this dusky hour, at the foot of Mount Gilboa
Soon the day will fall on its sword
And a cobalt blue evening will rise
With no moon.

pretty Jenin and her daughters once again will curl skyward
The allahu akhbar in the wonderful mak’am
And I will send fingers of a Hebrew Priest
To my loved ones who are in the mountains
And to you as well

Eliaz Cohen

Translated from the Hebrew by Larry Barak

About Eliaz Cohen

Eliaz Cohen, poet and social worker, was born in Petach-Tikva in 1972. He  is one of the leading figures in the renaissance of religious poetry and arts in Israel.

He is an editor of the "Mashiv Haru'ach" journal of poetry , and author of four published collections of poetry.

Cohen was the recipient of the "Prime Minister Award" for literature in 2006 and the "Avichay Sabbatical Prize" also in 2006.

He is a member in kibbutz Kfar-Etzion, married and a father of four.

To top of page

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Ana Bekoach – A Personal Liturgical Homily

A tribute to the Israeli poet, Amir Gilboa, by Elisha Porat who vividly recalls his days as a young poet and a soldier involved in fighting.


After the Yom Kippur War my first book of poems, Hushniya, The Mosque, appeared.  A few months earlier I had published my poem "Ana Bekoach" in the literary supplement of one of the newspapers.  A curious and peculiar poem, whose words appeared before my eyes and were thrust upon me from an unknown source.  And arranged themselves with great force.

In those post-war days, I was completing a number of lamentations, whose origin was a hasty draft on military papers that I happened to have at hand, in the Syrian enclave and in the emplacements along the northern border.  I believed in those poems, I believed in those lamentations.  They restored hope to me for a short while, as if it were in our power to bring the thousands of dead back to life.

I remember precisely the moment of birth of my poem "Ana Bekoach":  in a bus full of soldiers, returning to Israel, on the way from Kuneitra, as outside the low skies grew gray, heralding the coming of snow.  On the bus radio a cantor was singing a verse of the prayer "Ana Bekoach" – "Please, by the strength".  He performed it sensitively and with fervor, and the juxtaposition of those words caught my attention immediately.  A marvelous oxymoron, before which even the "King of Oxymorons" in modern Hebrew poetry, Natan Alterman, would have tipped his hat. 

 From within the contradictory pairing of gentleness and violence emerged the harmony of the poem that so wanted to be born.  The ingredients were repulsively familiar:  a shell shocked and exhausted soldier, returning home for a short and limited period of time, the threat of returning to the front not yet lifted.  His hunger for a woman, the absurd pairing of his fleshly lust with his impending death echo in the poem:

             … now is not the time ask

            by the strength of what, whither my pleas

            for soon must I take my leave:

            by lily light your body breathes

 One of my friends took the trouble to tell me, rather surprisingly, that he had heard the poet Amir Gilboa read some recent war poems to his students.  During that cursed winter of the war he gave guest lectures at the University of Tel Aviv, before whatever audience was not at the front.  Poems by unknown poets, those produced by the war.  And among the poems that he read were also poems of mine.  My friend added that Amir Gilboa said in his lecture that you could actually smell the fire and smoke rising from the poems.

 I, new and hesitant poet that I was, who had written these short lines only to unburden myself from the deep despair that had gripped my heart during the months of fighting, was very excited by his story:  see, I write not only for the trees and for the stones.  It turns out that there is someone who reads and someone who feels, on the far side of the vast distances of the battered land.  In the well-lit lecture halls of the campus in Tel Aviv, on the cozy lawns between the buildings, in the "backside" of the nation, deep in the "home front". 

 I did not know the poet Amir Gilboa then, and I hardly ever met him afterwards.  But I often read his poems.  I became filled with gratitude, and I preserved the fact of his winter attention in my heart.  A day will come, I knew, when I will be able to tell him a little of the things that filled my heart.  And may I be able, may I only find myself in the right mood, because it was so difficult in those days for me to discuss my poetry with someone else.  For there are no locks like those that make fast the hearts of poets.

 And afterwards, after the war, I went up to Jerusalem, and I immersed myself for several years in the deep and meaty Jewish texts.  I had some kind of biting hunger, that had intensified during the war.  And I threw myself into the Hebrew scriptures with enthusiasm, until I lost myself totally in them.

And thus I arrived again, with a sort of strange circularity, at the words of the prayer "Ana Bekoach".  I learned about its various interpretations, and I also grew to know it with the eyes of a disappointed lover, because not all of it is the linguistic pearl that I had imagined.  Only its opening is spectacular, and after that it falls immediately into tired and tiring language.  And one day, in some library in Jerusalem, I innocently opened Amir Gilboa's Blues and Reds, and read to my surprise:  "Ana Bekoach…".  A poem that he had written, of the same title, based on the same prayer with the same wonderful oxymoron.

I hesitated several days, just between me and myself, I was astounded by the discovery, and finally I gathered my courage and decided to write to him, to the Tel Aviv poet, and to point out to him the similarities between the poems.  For such things had happened in the past:  different people wrote from distant places and in different periods, about things that were astonishingly similar.  I put off writing to him from week to week.  Discomfort and a lack of real acquaintance, a feeling of invading his privacy, all of these weakened my anyway hesitant hand.  Until I read in some old ultra-Orthodox newspaper, that I had found in the library, an emotional article on the death throes of the Rabbi A.I.H. Kook.  I read with wonder but also with a feeling of déjà vu, how the streets of Jerusalem, around his small home, filled with people.  And how his distraught disciples loudly recited at his deathbed the words of the prayer:  "Ana Bekoach Gedulat Yemincha…".

 The wonderful account of the last moments of Rabbi Kook, written in the clumsy journalistic style of the thirties, a hodgepodge of words of great import, holy exaltations and inconsequential mundane details, flung me back to the Golan Heights' burning fields of basalt in that cursed war that began after Yom Kippur.  I was carried again to my soldier, dead-alive, in whose imagination the burning passion for a woman is joined to the awareness of approaching death:

             … I come to you straight from the Golan…

 And then I dared to write the letter to Amir Gilboa.  I no longer recall exactly what I wrote in my flustered confused letter.  I only remember that I was thrilled by the discovery of the amazing literary penetration of the phrase "Ana Bekoach".  Through the prayer to the poetry of his scorched Jewish Europe, as he found it at the end of the World War, when he was a soldier in the British army.  And from there to the poetry of my scorched Golan Heights, that I encountered in my war.  I also told him the moving story of the death throes of Rabbi Kook, of the voice calling out "Ana Bekoach", carried above the small streets of Jerusalem.  A voice in which the crowds gathering under his windows beg for the life of him that they so love, a love that they did not have time to express before he took his leave. 

 A few days passed and I received his reply, written in his hand, of which I have never seen more beautiful.  Of what did he speak to me in his letter?  Of a single tongue that wakes multiple tongues, belonging to various far-flung poets.  Of what joins them, and also what separates them, and which cannot be bridged.  And he also expressed a certain wonder at the way in which I interpreted this ancient scripture.  And he was immediately pleased by the singular fusion, compelling, between the fleshly lust, the sensation of impending death, and the great mystery that wraps them into a single coil. 

 In those days I was also reading the harsh poems of outcry that Amir Gilboa had published in Moznaim.  Poems of reaction, somewhat late, to the terror of the anxious days of the Yom Kippur War.  And I understood then, that not only in the soul of Rabbi Kook did there lie a great anxiety for the fate of this people, and not only in the soul of N.A., to whom the poems were dedicated, did there nest a severe trepidation for our future here.  The wonderful poet Amir Gilboa, as well, of blessed poetic memory, was deathly fearful for our lives here and for the life of the Hebrew language.

 All of this I wanted to write to him.  To leap over the wall of artificial boundaries, and to converse with him about my confusion as well.  But I missed my chance.  The man died with many matters unresolved.  And my matter, inconsequential, among them.  Today I very much regret that I did not say all of this to him.  May the little that I have said here be a candle to his memory.  And perhaps there is yet to be discovered some mysterious path, as written in the prayer "Ana Bekoach", to reach him and to say to his face a little of what I wanted to say.

For that is the "strength of the right hand" of true poets.  That even though they leave us, their spirit and their words, even those for which time ran out and that were not spoken at all, still live among us for many long years. 

 (On the twentieth anniversary of the death of Amir Gilboa.)

Translated from the Hebrew by Cindy Eisner

Khamsin on the Hills Khamsin on the Hills
Copyright of poems and texts belongs to the authors. Published here with permission.

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Waiting for a soldier to return from Afghanistan by "Lucy"
 

Still I Remain

Who is this man, that can pull a trigger,
and end a life without so much as
the quickening of his heartbeat?
What do his hands grasp now I wonder?
Cold metal, a Commando dagger,
whilst the memory of his soft touch,
still aches on the surface of my skin.

I may not know who he is, but my heart does.
It shouts his name with every beat,
and grieves every second that we’re parted.
It knows every inch of his skin,
and can see the edges of his soul.
Each beat a metronome counting,
the moments until he’s safe in my arms.

I didn’t know that fear like this was possible.
But it has become my everyday companion.
I’m waiting for him alone in the darkness,
like a princess locked in a tower,
whilst I spin my fear into hope and,
my love and prayers into a suit of armour,
to keep him safe.  Still I remain.

"Lucy"

February 2009

 

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Bradley Shane

Although not a soldier, I have be re-enacting war events for over 20 years depicting military life of both a 18th and 19th century soldier.  I have heard and read the stories of war all my life.  It is to the memories of the fallen that I dedicate this poem.
 

A SOLDIERS PLEA
 

If only all the dead could cry out
In a single roar
And say don't send a mother's son
To die a death in war

They'd say look at how we lay
Without life or limb
The bullet that tore our breast so wide
Has caused our eyes to dim

The flash of a musket
The crack of a bullets speed
A small piece of death is sent
To splinter bone and bleed

The cannon sends a rain of death
Of steel and grit and bone
Pay no heed to the dying man
Or take pity on his moan

The orders are always the same
Move forward boys make hast
A yard of ground a league today
Don't think of the horror and the waste

The war boys, the wars for all
God's on the side that's right
But the devil owns the battlefield
When you hear the cries at night

A drummers rolls a steady beat
A bugle plays a mournful tune
A sword is dipped in honor
For the mothers son who died too soon

Bradley Shane

18 Dec 2008