Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven

My English cyberfriend and Methodist clergywoman Elizabeth Stanforth-Sharpe posted a moving poem online today. It deserves re-posting without further comment from me.


The Day The War Came
by Nicola Davies

The day war came there were flowers on the window sill
and my father sang my baby brother back to sleep.
My mother made my breakfast, kissed my nose
and walked with me to school.

That morning I learned about volcanoes, I sang a song about how tadpoles turn at last to frogs.
I made a picture of myself with wings.
Then, just after lunch, while I watched a cloud shaped like a dolphin, war came.
At first, just like a spattering of hail
a voice of thunder…
then all smoke and fire and noise, that I didn’t understand.

It came across the playground.
It came into my teacher’s face.
It brought the roof down.
and turned my town to rubble.

I can’t say the words that tell you
about the blackened hole that had been my home.

All I can say is this:

war took everything

war took everyone

I was ragged, bloody, all alone.

I ran. Rode on the back of trucks, in buses;
walked over fields and roads and mountains,
in the cold and mud and rain;
on a boat that leaked and almost sank
and up a beach where babies lay face down in the sand.

I ran until I couldn’t run
until I reached a row of huts
and found a corner with a dirty blanket
and a door that rattled in the wind

But war had followed me.
It was underneath my skin,
behind my eyes,
and in my dreams.
It had taken possession of my heart.

I walked and walked to try and drive war out of myself,
to try and find a place it hadn’t reached.
But war was in the way that doors shut when I came down the street
It was in the way the people didn’t smile, and turned away.

I came to a school.
I looked in through the window.
They were learning all about volcanoes
And drawing birds and singing.

I went inside.
My footsteps echoed in the hall
I pushed the door and faces turned towards me
but the teacher didn’t smile.
She said, there is no room for you,
you see, there is no chair for you to sit on,
you have to go away.

And then I understood that war had got here too.

I turned around and went back to the hut, the corner and the blanket
and crawled inside.
It seemed that war had taken all the world and all the people in it.

The door banged.
I thought it was the wind.
But a child’s voice spoke
“I brought you this,” she said “so you can come to school.”
It was a chair. A chair for me to sit on and learn about volcanoes, frogs and singing
And drive the war out of my heart.

She smiled and said “My friends have brought theirs too, so all the children here can come to school”

Out of every hut a child came and we walked together,
on a road all lined with chairs.
Pushing back the war with every step.

Witty parody is not the same as clever but ultimately horrifying, not at all

In her blog a couple of weeks ago, Frances Garrood mentioned that “Naming of Parts” by Henry Reed was her favorite war poem. I had never heard of either Henry Reed or his poem, so I looked them up. I learned that Henry Reed (22 February 1914 – 8 December 1986) was a British poet, translator, radio dramatist and journalist. The first paragraph about him in Wikipedia says:

Reed was born in Birmingham and educated at King Edward VI School, Aston, followed by the University of Birmingham. At university he associated with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Walter Allen. He went on to study for an M.A. and then worked as a teacher and journalist. He was called up to the Army in 1941, spending most of the war as a Japanese translator. Although he had studied French and Italian at university and taught himself Greek at school Reed did not take to Japanese, perhaps because he had learned an almost entirely military vocabulary. Walter Allen in his autobiography As I Walked down New Grub Street quoted Reed as saying “He intended...to devote every day for the rest of his life to forgetting another word of Japanese.”

“Naming of Parts” is actually Part I of a six-part poem entitled “Lessons Of The War” (the six parts were published separately over a period of several years) . One site calls it “a witty parody of British army basic training during World War II” but after reading all six parts I disagree. I found it clever but ultimately horrifying. Francis, as I said, called it her favorite war poem.

My favorite war poem (by which I mean my favorite poem about war, not a poem about my favorite war) has always been a tie between “The Blue and The Gray” by Francis Miles Finch (see this post) and “In Flanders Field” by John McCrae (see this post). The first is about the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the second is about World War I (1914-1918) , but both are really more about the aftermath of war than war itself.

I have decided to link to the six parts of “Lessons Of the War” individually so that you can tackle the poem at your own pace and decide for yourself how witty, clever, or horrifying it is.

Here they are:

LESSONS OF THE WAR
Part I. “Naming of Parts”
Part II. “Judging Distances”
Part III. “Movement of Bodies”
Part IV. “Unarmed Combat”
Part V. “Psychological Warfare”
Part VI. “Returning Of Issue”

After you have waded through plodded through finished reading the entire work, I would love to hear what you think.

What I think, in case anyone is interested, is that the lessons of war are many, and we have learned none of them. Or maybe that we must learn them over and over, because we keep forgetting.