Poems by Michael Brett

 

Main Index

First World War
poets and poetry

Minds at War
The classic poems of First World War, popular poems of the time, lesser known poets and a wealth of background material.

Illustrations include contemporary photographs.




Out in the Dark
Anthology of First World War poetry recommended for students and the general reader.

Illustrations include contemporary photographs.


Poetry about the Second World War


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War poetry by Michael Brett

These poems seem to have their origins the First World War, wars in Yugoslavia, perhaps the first Gulf War (Iraq, 1991) and possibly more recent wars. The imagery is often striking and the commentary subtle, tending to convey a world of twisted values, a world striking or even beautiful in its cruelty and insensitivity to the soldiers who become just part of the technology of war.

The poems are:

Armistice Poem

Oil Heart

Bomb Circuitry

Tabby Cat War Baby

Twenty-One

Artillery Barrage

Tonight’s Target is the Face of Scrooge 

Archangel  

Dead Machine Gun Crew

Artillery Shells

Armistice Poem

People used to believe that Death was a living person,

Who roamed in the night like a cloak

Embroidered with darkness; that

Death was a traveller

Who carried sadness and regret.

Death does exist but in many different ways: not in the breeze

Of night wind,

Not in graves, nor in cemeteries.

Or just in War.

Death makes you exist only in your absence:

Crowded restaurants and bars

Are filled with you not being there;

Libraries boom with the books you never wrote,

And on white screens are the films you never made.

The Cenotaph is silent, filled with the voices

Of the families you never had.

Michael Brett

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Oil Heart

Off camera and up close, this sea of war trembles like broken glass.

Its waves are shards, nose cones and bayonets.

Its faces are not calm as statues, but as anxious as turtles

Creaking and splashing in tides they cannot control.

The middle-aged cannot do this alone.

The young are told that they are beautiful in uniform.

Films are made, flattering them, deluging them

With stars. Yet they are more like Orion betrayed

In Renaissance tapestries. Only together can these two scoop

Red oceans out of continents in lengths of time, atomic.

This ocean is oil and water.

Its trade winds are speeches.

Now the days do not pass. They bubble to the surface

From events and places long-forgotten. A subterranean drowned market

Emerges in war’s long low tides, peopled by old young men

With a new language for old things: Greek fire, siege engines

And ways of spreading disease. In the open air at last,

They sit on easy chairs, thrilled to be normal.

Statesmen say that they are angels. Their wings are our applause.

They claim to walk on water. Its waves, grey and curling as monks’ cowls,

Slide the oozy invasion shores. Their newspaper gulls dive for scraps.

Only in sleep can you escape war’s oil heart beating, beating.

All seems madness yet everyone says that this is logic,

Wooden, dry, like the touch of a piece on a chessboard.

So now I am a news exile. I watch only cartoon shows

And go to bed early. I only glance at the papers.

Muddy, I flail in war. Before its weighty armoured lies,

Its perverse and roaring beauty, I splash helplessly

Like someone drowning in oil.

2001

Michael Brett

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Bomb Circuitry

Consider the circuitry of a bomb. Like you

It works with a telephone call.

A circuit board has political independence.

It has its own batteries, its own power.

It is as pretty and clever as a tube map.

Its parts are ancient books and modern coins.

A bomber is an artist, an electric surrealist

Who sees towers as gibbets, forests as fish bones.

On the black print of his newspaper, he solders

Semtex to gold, timers to copper.

He can write in the smoke over cars and buildings,

Sketch with the trails of planes and speedboats.

He can arrange death like a tub of flowers in the street

As a work of art, a Goya bullfight with bands and costumes.

Michael Brett

 

Machine Gun

He is a conjuror.

His bullets are birds’ eggs.

He cloaks the theatre in his magic smoke.

He mesmerises people. He cuts ladies in half.

Encamped, wind battered in a tent

Of flesh, I carry him and his boxes as he tours.

I watch his stars with nets of bad luck

Trawl the world.

Each day is an argument, a museum we fight for.

Sleep is three hours in a dust filled bath

Under some noseless statues.

Beneath the awning of a marble hand,

I contemplate my future and my maps.

The colours of the nations are rich as bruises.

Roads are red veins. My conjuror has scissors.

He cuts the air.

He cuts us all.

He makes people disappear.

Michael Brett

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Tabby Cat War Baby

If you lie upside-down and look at it,

The sky is a lake where someone has thrown oil barrels.

Smoke leaks upwards in black trails.

Somewhere distant and comic, machine guns are nails dragged down washboards.

Next to an abandoned washing machine

And riddled signpost, a cat cries for food.

No-one knows if the cat is Serb or Croat. Maybe he’s Muslim.

He rubs his head in each soldier’s hand equally,

Military or paramilitary.

He is a Jazz musician in a wrecked café.

He is the old Yugoslavia, hanging on

With his one eye and his handful of tunes:

I love you and I’m hungry

Playing in an empty town to passing audiences.

Michael Brett

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Twenty-One

Soldiers are cards in the casino, war.

Alive, they stand proud in hands, like cockades and plumes.

Killed, they fall like money.

They lie face up, face down

In graves of Patience, on a field of baize.

Soldiers are the toys of croupiers.

They are dealt along lines and pathways

To places with numbers for names.

Every November, in churches,

You can hear their names

Read out slowly, like football results.

Michael Brett

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Artillery Barrage

An artillery barrage is like a giant’s fist beating

On a bar top, everything jumps: glasses, change,

Trees, boulders, mud. Entire hillsides

Leap, topple, sometimes vanish in wild dents

Encased in instants of fire and smoke

That drift like ghosts of other wars.

An artillery barrage is like a drunken juggler.

It dances in flames on the edge of a curtain.

Houses, trees are like skittles.

They leap upwards, tumbling over and over.

They are never caught. They smash.

It is a wind. Through it, a forest wanders

Like a fleet dissolving in a hurricane.

Smoke faces contort, shake their fists and vanish.

I am drowning in noise that makes ears and noses bleed.

The smell is strange, like a smoky hot bed.

Like a loopy grin, a bridge collapses and someone laughs.

Chunks the size of a piano hurtle skywards vertically.

Now we will walk towards it.

Michael Brett

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Tonight’s Target is the Face of Scrooge

War like cities is more lovely at night.

I climb tank tracks, like Jacob’s Ladder

To the ridge and watch the bombardment

Bursting in red gold and silver coin phosphorous,

Santa Claus pouches. Tonight’s target is the crumbling

Face of Scrooge. These sounds are not bombs,

Not schools or hospitals, they are Ming vases,

Old Masters juggled by drunks.

Once governments told to mind how you cross a road.

Now they urge you stream between instant potholes, run excitedly

In lines of zeros like the zero hour on digital displays,

In long lines, like those on armaments’ manufacturers’ cheques.

The burglar bullet that ransacks your heart

Is a kiss, a blessing, a golden guinea.

The shells that travel over your heads like priests’ hands,

Explode hilariously, like drunks falling over. It is a party.

Above you are the fireworks of a hundred nations.

Check your magazine. It is loaded with party poppers.

Michael Brett

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Archangel

Nettles that are called Archangel

Stand tall in the corner of my garden

With cloaks of shadow at their back.

The birds sing but everything else seems wrong

And I, and everything in the world,

Whistle like radios out of tune

Heard through and open window

Where a curtain is blowing, streaming

With terrible news.

Michael Brett

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Dead Machine Gun Crew

The gunners’ green faces are crowned with flies

And their grey arms flung, across the barrel of the gun,

Like drunks around some girls.

They lie sliced like lemon into strands

By holidaying shells and rockets.

They are brothers in arms, in decay, mingled

Next to their brassy, live and gleaming bullets.

You cannot tell which foot, which hand

Goes with which dry and tearless eye

Filled with dust and scraps of leaves.

Around them, tracers lace the upper air.

Raindrops drum on helmets, hearts and broken glass.

Shells plod their way across the street.

Some soldiers looting beers from the shop next door

Spare them no second glance.

For now they are neither friends nor enemies.

They are part of a different army,

Whose drill is stillness, whose bond is silence.

Their new country is the greatest secret.

It is more secret than their map that lies beside them, still,

With its scribbles in red, its lines and times of attack.

The clouds burst. Naked, face uppermost, dead,

Its paper crackles in the rain.

Michael Brett

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Artillery Shells

Some sound like drunks blowing kisses.

Others pass overhead as if they are calling to friends.

Sometimes, when they burst, they sound scared and huddle

Like children at the end of the range, clattering, murmuring,

Throwing clods of earth and waving smoky arms.

The last big howitzer sounded sad, a finger

Sliding down the E-string of a bass,

Reluctant, resentful, as if it were being cheated

Of a future in a cathedral or art gallery.

The 75 millimetres sound spiteful and bitter though.

You can imagine them in stocking masks,

Kicking in your windows, looking for people

Cowering in the cellar and finding them.

Michael Brett

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