image Clay Bennett
Throughout history, there have been diarists, novelists and poets who’ve gone to war and then based their art from their experiences:
Here, Bullet
If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time. – Brian Turner
Brian Turner, a 23-year-old infantryman and poet, has already received notice and awards for his book Here, Bullet.
As related to the SF Chronicle:
Before he was deployed to Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Sgt. Brian Turner had seen movies and read novels about men at war. The stories were mostly hero narratives: a group of soldiers captures a bridge, a platoon frees a buddy captured by enemy forces.
“But when I went to Iraq,” Turner says, “I didn’t find anything like that. All I found was boredom as a backdrop to everything, punctuated by very intense moments. I couldn’t thread all that together.”
So he threaded it together in his poems.
Caravan
“Today, in Baghdad, a bomb
kills forty-seven and wounds over one hundred,
leaving a crater ten feet deep. The stunned
gather body parts from the roadway
to collect in cardboard boxes
which will not be taped and shipped
to the White House lawn, not buried
under the green sod thrown over, box by box
emptied into the rich soil in silence
while a Marine sentry stands guard
at the National Monument, Tomb of the Unknown . . . “
I haven’t read the book, but these poems excerpted at Boing Boing and in the Chronicle really struck me, and I felt compelled to share them. In a culture that often celebrates war in word, film and photo, it’s necessary to try to get a more rounded picture.
