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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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