After the War

Abstract

26 WLT MARCH–APRIL 2017 poetry Across the Aegean to Ionian sea, would be sparse journeying, even with winds slack or rebelling. And the one-eyed monsters, lovely nymphs, temptresses, we always knew their story: Tales made-up long after, to explain his extended, sorrow-drenched absence, and the map’s mystery – how directionless were all his wanderings. So why ten years to cross such slender waters, his heart and helm carrying him only from, never toward hearth or harbor his own, always further from known hills and air and eyes that want at dusk, like dusk, to settle on him softly – why each day his traveling farther away, even as he kept telling every stranger, any listening ear, that he wants only to go home? * What was never told: how after the war, he was heartsick. As a hollow holds its emptiness. Seeking for before or, perhaps, forgetfulness. And grieving for what was now his forever unblessed – this fragile frame he’d seen broken and spoken into utter meaninglessness. * Shell-shocked, he wanders across the seas – then descends to where his dead reside, together with himself unforgiven. At every dark crossing, unfathomed silence his only dissent. * He had never wanted to go to war. When they came for him, he feigned madness. Later, he hid in the belly of the wooden horse he alone had dreamed of, thinking it alone might end the rage, exploding skies raining down on the small soft bodies of night. * All the while, in the narrow alleyways splintered and slivered in the dark I could hear shreds of shredded boy and breath whose back is bent under weighty pack single purposed with all pale means to staunch blood, stifle pain, till hastily stretchered out – but he is left After the War by Rachel Tzvia Back History moves darkly and we are small, soft things. – Kazim Ali top photo : getty / afp photo / mahmud hams bottom photo : stéphane chaumet behind amid the debris, shocked and shelled in the shrapnelled world, every jagged and broken piece viciously singing – * Not the dead, but the ones who survived – the sons whose wounds do not bleed or speak, and whose weary feet, at yet another village edge, have a hard time walking – * So sing to me, O Muse, of he who in twists and turns is driven off course in dark combat fatigue endlessly wandering – Start where you will in songs for our time and my lost son – Raise terrible grief to music – and then bring him home. NOTES The idea of Odysseus as shell-shocked was given to me by the storyteller, scholar, and activist Hamutal Guri. In an email she wrote: “This last year I find myself thinking a great deal about Odysseus as suffering from shell-shock, and of his wanderings, The Odyssey, as his ongoing therapeutic process moving him toward the ability to remember what needs to be remembered, and to leave behind what needs to be left behind”(August 2016). Epigraph: Kazim Ali, “Disappearance: An Interview with Britney Gulbrandsen,”in Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine (University of Michigan Press, 2015), 42. Sixth section: This section is informed by Wallace Stevens’s poem “A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home”(1946) in The Palm at the End of the Mind (Vintage Books, 1972), 282–283. Seventh section: Passages lifted from The Odyssey are from Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation. The phrase “raise grief to music”is Louis Zukofsky’s, from “A-11”in A. Poet and translator Rachel Tzvia Back lives in the Galilee, where her great-great-great-grandfather settled in the 1830s. Her poetry collections include A Messenger Comes (elegies), On Ruins & Return, Azimuth, and the forthcoming collection entitled What Use Is Poetry, the Poet Is Asking. Her most recent translation project, On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg, will be published in spring 2017. Visit the WLT website to listen to the author read her poem. WORLDLIT.ORG 27 ...