Poems by Michael Brett

Theatre of War

The entrance bugles its golden welcome

Like a disco. A strange escalator draws you in,

You scarcely notice it, or the framed arms factory cheques

And catalogues of prosthetic limbs. You are blinded,

Deafened by cameras and speeches.

 
There is a sense of disappointment when you see it:

A cardboard box, a children's theatre where-

On painted sticks-move the aeroplanes, tanks and guns

To the paper rhythms of

Newspapers, tv and election deadlines.

Michael Brett

November 2009

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9/11 Poem from London

Tomorrow, it will all run backwards.

 
The steel tsunamis will froth back upwards

And become solid.

The planes will be pulled out like javelins

And slide backwards, swallowing their vapour trails.

Tomorrow, everyone will be fine.

Tomorrow, everyone who died will come home.

They will sit again at the tables of home

And rejoin life's fellowship, its snapshots, tea

And picnics.

Tomorrow, all will be well.

Everyone will sleep as babies do under mobiles,

Untroubled by strange sounds, of aero engines

Flying too low and shadows over the streets.

Tomorrow, mobile phones will be just toys again.

The sky will be clear, blue, unbroken.

Michael Brett

December 2009

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Blood

The heart's an old gentleman with a bowler and pocket watch,

At the weekend a European king with

A cloth cap and bicycle. The body's his palace

And the blood his subjects. They commute

In tubeway capillaries, tunnels.
 

In war, the blood revolts, becomes platoons

Ransacking bodies, palaces, splashes walls, roads

Car windscreens. It acts at random,

Jumping in or out of people; grows cold

Or furious. Distress makes the noisy quiet,

The peaceful, rowdy. They shout out their lungs

In public bars, saying War is hell

Yet somehow they seem the greater for it.

Michael Brett

Star Shells over Stonehenge

Stonehenge, right next to an artillery range,

Had its megaliths, lit by star shells. These

Were like the severed halves of giant stone men-

Stomachs vanished- holding hands.

The sky and we- just Army cadets- were worlds intersecting

Like lines in Futurist paintings. The guns,

Were giant curtains and doors opening

And slamming in the sky.

My father saw this in 1940, his father in 1917.

Perhaps time is like this:

Past, present and future don't ease apart like trains.

They collide with one another. They

Are beaten together like heads. Nations

Are engines that thrust all these like pool balls into Ds.

Perhaps that is greatness: giant stone men,

Raising sparks, banging ages together like star shells;

Somewhere a Great Caesar dreams of an existence-

Unbuilt - in the centre of the Stonehenge ring

Lit by lights of wars past, present and those to come.

Michael Brett

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The Blue Mosque, Istanbul

Here, near where the sea uncoils

Like a giant ammonite, cerulean blue,

Are the ninety-nine names of God.

Perhaps the sea too is an eye of Allah,

Watching everything as the fat cat Moon

Jumps over the rooftops of the city.

It all seems so secular, unIslamic.

When the Hazaan sounded, the beers still arrived

And -during Ramadan- Bayan Zaman smoking cigarettes

In daytime went unremarked.

But open a newspaper, or talk to the taxi drivers

Or piyango sellers hustling on the main roads,

Then fear and anger are like two notes repeated on the piano.

Newspapers, television x-ray the region, penetrate

The nudity of blood, bone and street corners.

My nephew goes to war, but I to lunch,

At a café where the fishing boats

Slide up like skaters. Forty minutes away,

Other motors stop and start. The ninety-nine names

Are broken mirrors there, glass circles the air like haloes.

There, some see bullets as a kind of kiss, a blessing.

Michael Brett

Civil War

Tomorrow, the Keeper of the Public Latrines

Again will be Lord of Life and Death and

With stone eyes and a stone hand, I salute him.

My God is a resigned acceptance of the solitary and the pointless.

The graves of my soldiers jostle one another for a place in the sun.

I knew him before he was powerful.

For him, I ordered the dead to canvas the living.

But they never notice us. Our faces are on statues.

Our barracks are the intestines of birds and fish.

Our names are long rebukes on pieces of stonework.

But, in the villages, time is a train you can step down from.

A wise woman is always at hand. Her prophecies always come true.

I know it will all end when his widow stands before his open grave

And asks who shot his enemies.

I'll shoot him then.

Michael Brett

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Suicide Bomber

(London, my home, was attacked by suicide bombers on 7/7/05)

I became a Buckingham Palace guide for death.

I timed my transformation to the instant (8.51)

I climbed aboard a Piccadilly Line train.

Look, admire death’s portraits and its corridors.

Over its flowers I would rearrange the flowers of yourselves

In the vases of your bodies.

My bones were an embroidery of the air.

This was no loss of life but a culmination.

My body was a set of mosaic pieces destined for this instant.

My violence, a kind of art, a dream language, like music

Something scribbled in the surprised air.

When it subsided-my ragged portrait-

The police and the army were my tourists.

They entered, looked around, took photographs

And spoke in hushed tones.

I had blessed the train with reverence.

I was the man with no head and a bar of chocolate.

Michael Brett

People shouting in your face

The one really useful thing I learned from the Army

Is how to say nothing when people shout in your face.

(In London, people who do this can sometimes be mad

Or carrying weapons.)

At school, we'd go to training camps where a man

Would shout in your face if you missed a drill move

Or your rifle wasn't straight.

Justice, fairness seemed to be fugitives in the wet surrounding woods

And saying anything just made things worse.

You just had to stand there and take it.

In films, gunfire has noble qualities, like bugle fanfares

And the flapping of flags at sunset

But they are all just machines that shout in your face,

Or try to kill you.

On the tube home, a nutter shouts in my face.

I look at him. I change trains. I say nothing.

Michael Brett

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Below monthly killed numbers for you

In the London Press Office, we are waiting for the news.

We are Egyptian monkeys playing with graveyard skulls,

The fax paper twitches, then slides like a séance wine glass,

Then-as if a ghost is trapped inside the drum-

Begins to whirr and clatter.

Bosnia-Herzegovina Ministry of Health.

Below monthly killed numbers for you

The letters are archaeological, dactylic,

Linear B musing beneath an arc of shells.

In their homes, 2,724. Missing 8,656.

Outside, the buses cough and grumble to Piccadilly.

An old man sweeps up Autumn leaves.

More monthly killed numbers follow.

My deadline is three for the evening edition.

I take the fractured words, the question marked numbers,

And rewrite them

In beautiful English prose

And I feel guilty, thuggish.

Michael Brett

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Mosques and Rockets

 Daily life can only bark in backyards at the stars,

But rockets and mosques point in the same direction:

Counting down in Arabic. They are both clean as needles.

Both stare up at stars painted on Moorish lattice work

Or ceilings of wood or Perspex. At dawn, they

Stand and steam, are horses bridled by Mathematics,

Saddled by Astronomy. We can lie and steal,

Make compromises and say That’s the way Life is.

But rocket motors call like Mullahs from the skies.

Their flames are things once seen only in Greek speculation,

Dactyls or swirls of Arabic. For both, Zero and Hazaan times

Are blast-offs. Perhaps both are Jihads for the merciful.

US and Russian astronauts, Sufis, see in the curves of moons,

The same fragile curves that cup the thoughts in human skulls.

All these float between worlds. Above the clouds

The Earth is their flexed symposium, a spherical table

Where they pour out thoughts like hot tea into glasses.

Michael Brett 

The Surgeon Explosive

 From a big country, in big plane,

I travelled ten thousand miles to be here,

To this bed-sized scrap, to this sick land

My world has shrunk to.

I am examined every moment

By the Surgeon Explosive.

He takes my pulse.

I can feel his binocular gaze pinching me,

Running over my back, prodding me like a farmer.

Then he goes away.

Everything is quiet, but I know I am not safe.

Somewhere over the ridge, he stands in consultation

With the enemy.

They compare me to the next man, and decide.

He raises their standards.

They start to pretend to be disinterested, professional.

But as their scope cross hairs comb my hair,

I know that they are jealous

Of my cigarettes and chocolate.

Smoke is his nurse.

She grimaces, and shakes her fist before dissolving,

Before calling him.

There he is.

Over there, I can see him at work

Among the soldiers, with his scalpel-steel-

Examining, dissecting.

Michael Brett

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Ploughing

Why didn’t they bury me deeper?

Once a gypsy read my palm and said

I’d own a vast estate. Here it is.

I’d have no money worries.

That bit was right.

My life was dragged in a blanket to this grave

By some friends-in a delirium of blood-

It was night time. They were scared

And did not see me breathe or take my pulse.

I felt drunk so it didn’t seem so bad-

Like jumping to the top of a first night theatre queue-

To be first in the cradle of recoiling earth,

And swaddled by the heavy guns from home.

But now, buried in a rush, too high- just below the plough-

Each day is just too hot or cold for me.

I’d love to climb the earthen steps

And drop the wasted decades, one by one.

As their spades arranged the earth above my face,

I thought they said, some day, they’d take me home.

They’d bury me- properly- somewhere nicer far than this.

Then a machine gun coughed, and no-one spoke again.

That was years ago.

Now the crows all circle. The tractor comes.

The plough opens the earth’s clay volume at my page.

O why won’t the soldiers come again?

Why won’t they take me home?

Michael Brett

The Mecca and Medina Road

On the road sign it says Mecca Muslims only

-In English-like a London road sign, reading Hatfield and the North.

Here in the Saudi Desert, I cannot see Islam anywhere.

In Pakistan, you see it swirling in white Arabic

On green paint, on roadside hoardings,

Or streaming on flags.

You see it in what people do:

During Ramadan, the clerk in the Egyptair office

Asked me put out my cigarette.

He could not smoke at them moment, he said,

And it was driving him mad.

The Prophet (pbuh) must have been on this road,

But I cannot hear the Muezzins in their towers

Calling everyone to prayer,

As they do in Cairo, or in Dhaka.

There at dawn-it is a wonder, an electrical dawn chorus:

A thousand hazaans; a thousand gramophones,

At different speeds and pitches, pummelling the windows,

Shaking the bed: Wake up. Wake up.

In Granada, the Alhambra soars above its flowers.

In Fez, Al Quds, tourists snap at each other

And tour guides, between forest pillars

That conduct the cool air

And grow Arabic like ivy.

Here there is only the wind, my hired car, rocks,

And the hawk hunting jerboas overhead.

Arshad (a Bangla Sufi really) was shocked when saw King Faisal

Cast into his grave, near here, between some rocks:

Without a headstone.

He said, and made the gesture with his hands,

They just dropped him in.

Salafis find Allah in wilderness and wild places.

I am jealous of their certainty, their assurance.

I keep looking for it on road signs. I’ve found it nowhere.

 Michael Brett

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London-from Aqaba to Zem Zem

 
Once all we wanted was a little space:

When the kitchen and the cooking pots did not seem big enough,

When-at home-even the President’s giant rooms were crazed

With marauding soldiers stripping bath taps, lights and mirrors.

Then nothing could seem big enough.

When men are dangerous, space is safety.

Then the largest spaces, ocean or desert,

Have a voiceless call and motion.

Then sandy ribs of dunes are waves

And Atlantic waves are dunes and

Inside their pulse, the longing for a space

Unbracketed by time or maps becomes unendurable.

Then the London A to Z stands for London

From Aqaba to Zem Zem.

This London runs through people like the Silk Road.

Its end is no mysterious gunshot or sari drenched in petrol.

Here the wider world is not a cheap and crackling radio, but

Like a distant star both real and dreamlike. It is something far away,

Dull and like a number on a celestial map,

But as close and brilliant as the brightest jewel in the ear

Of the darkest passenger next to you on the tube.

Beneath an aircraft wing, London twists like the crowd

That spins around the Kaaba. Delirious as a fishing reel,

It spools you in. In a café in a London street

I hear my native language. Let me translate for you:

They are worried about the tax man not the secret police.

 Michael Brett

Refugees (1)

 
As the searchlights bandaged its dying air,

My mind burned with my city.

I watched my people wandering through colonnades

Of smoke, searching for the lost

Or for new countries.

The frontiers of my life have turned to fissures:

Beneath the elegant aircraft, like dancers, bombing us.

Only songs, not lives, have gained in value

Now that they are propped by broken walls.

In the last hours, recorded trumpets slapped

Through loudspeakers, at an unshaved dawn.

But it was not victory. The war just sank

In our harbour, with our ships,

My passport and somewhere to go.

Now, the birds will have returned.  The grass

Over the ruins will be a beard around the sun.

New streets, like babies, kick and cry

Shaking off the dead.

But, like those beneath the fallen buildings,

Beneath the water in the shell holes and ditches,

I shall never return.

Perhaps I’ll find a new job today.

Perhaps the rain will saw up the sky

And help me as I slice the Moon into rings

And sell off the pieces from the back of a truck.

Refugees (2)

 
Down they came, after the first attack,

Both our language and our music were beyond repair.

The UN and NGOs are tidying up.

Their wrecking balls and pickaxes break up our metaphors and similes.

Look. In ostrich plumes of dust, poems fall, crashing like dropped chandeliers.

Our books are gone, finished.

Pickaxes eat their blue way through white paper domes, black letters,

-Us.

Outside music is burning on fires all over town.

(People walk past the heaps in silence, looking for food or money.)

Notes are hacked from the stretched whale innards of gutted symphonies.

Some phrases survive, are hauled off on the backs of trucks by foreign troops.

Big bits sometimes end in museums, or bars.

Oddments go to flea markets -are pickled in jars-

Or swapped by kids in playgrounds.

And inside all the radios, televisions and kitchens

Everyone is silent because

Smoke from these fires is a gag across the mouth of our world.

 Michael Brett

Soldiers

 Of course, there are three kinds:

 
There are the cheery young ones, up at the bar:

Buying you beers,

Showing you pictures of their families.

Then, the pomegranate men in an armoured column:

Its metal back flexing like a centipede,

Its helicopter whiskers, its burr of drones.

Cut off a limb and its body would merely shorten,

Perhaps grow stronger.

Its experts are trained.

They dismantle gearboxes, tanks, men.

You see them in pieces at the roadside.

Then there are the magicians:

The ones whose single wave,

Or tapped letter on a plastic keyboard,

Begins the show.

They can stop a thousand clocks-

A thousand hearts-at once

With a wave of a wand in a jeweller’s shop.

At their bidding, shells put on ballerina dresses,

Pirouette, explode.

Sometimes it is hard to tell them apart.

Over a newly-discovered bomb, they all move

Like genius crabs: waving tools and studying manuals.

Michael Brett

Missing Person

There are no roses at the end,

No raised glasses, no speeches,

As a missing person makes the world lighter,

Leaves everyone with a kind of debt.

A name that has no-one floats away

Like a holiday photograph

Of no-one waving from lost blue seas.

A ghost’s bedroom is guarded like a prince’s,

By mothers, wives, and soldier ranks

Of empty suits and empty shoes.

A ghost has an answering machine but no home,

The parabolas of jets and bombs,

Lead to a new geological age, to fossil lives.

They leave no place, no centre, for love to go to;

It can just catch trains of half-remembered conversations

That lead only to pictures of a ghost.

Firemen, soldiers, the inquiring spades that probe as shrapnel,

Police dogs. These are guests at a kind of wedding

Where ghost and man fuse.

Behind Police Line Don’t Cross tapes,

A policewoman with his wallet blots out the sun.

 Michael Brett

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Bomb Attack

 
The first pass is invisible.

Its slipstream can make a rock of the head

In a Turner seascape.

The bird, death, wanders the domes from ear to ear,

Sometimes deafening them;

Sometimes making them bleed.

Sometimes, it just lands.

Then, its stillness amazes you.

The fringes flickering over plastic eyes,

Amongst the corkscrew smoke and sirens.

It makes sparrows of men, men of sparrows.

Sparrows don’t want to die, either.

They paddle as fast as they can,

Away from the sparrow hawk death,

Whose wings are a shadow over the sun.

Michael Brett

Facing the Music:

Hyde Park Corner Bomb Explosion (Number 2) 20th July 1982

I heard the second bomb. Its iron door slammed

In the new prison of the sky, and

All the Kensington windows rattled in their frames,

Then opened: people stared out.

Where was it?

What was it? The Israeli Embassy?

The Iranian Embassy? Something else?

Or who?

-A giant question mark of smoke.

In Tyburn, dead like Raleigh,

Safe and headless, Cromwell slept,

Immune from his Irish politics.

In Whitehall, generals planned counter-insurgencies.

Guards watched security videos.

In high security prisons;

In their own homes, under surveillance, IRA men yawned.

But here, the skies and we were caught in nets

Of sirens, death and smoke:

Dying trumpeters, horses, drummers

-all of us-

All left to face the music.

Michael Brett

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

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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