The battle, A game of chess & Rage
by Harold Rhenisch
[ poetry - january 05 ]
The battle
We've come to the war to write the story
of the valiant troops, those ten-year-olds
with kalashnikovs who prowl the bush.
We've come equipped to bribe our way
past burnt out trucks set up in ambush
(cigarettes); to show the world
the living face of all our novelists' indiscretions
(a cameraman, with cables, meters);
to get past the nights when mosquitoes suck
the malaria tablets from our blood to lay us out
for the final cut (drink). We've planned it out.
Then the trouble starts, the airport blocked,
the harbour empty, no gas for cars,
no water in our hotel (bombed out)
no way to reach the front (no front),
and as we drink the slow night
into a sea of sweat, salt into salt,
words into paper, paper into pulp,
no way to get the message out.
A game of chess
When asked to heal, the words I set
on the chequered board angle across
to the other side, where each is found
where it was not, leave fields behind
and black forests, rich towns, mills,
weirs and children running in packed yards
of sagging stables; pounce and scheme,
build sacred halls, tear earthworks down,
fall maimed or dead or damned, or worse,
the realpolitik of a mind facing
its own blindness and the beautiful queen
across the gulf of what it knows
but can not heal. Healing is a different art,
the hands thrust into autumn soil,
the knobs of garlic like buried stones
that once were eyes or hungry mouths,
clammering together in their sleep,
the dreams that come from long patience,
that come in crowds of breathless absence
that do not ask and do not answer -
rook and bishop, knight and queen,
pushed aside as the king steps out
from his keep at last to answer the charge
of his own presumption and receive the praise
of life in his long mirror or death in ours.
Rage
We call it rage, the water rising within our words,
the sandbags banked against the walls,
the cattle trucked to higher ground,
and we, who are the banks, willows, reeds
and rotten tires, the dikes of cars and rock
trucked down from mountains made in fire,
crushed by ice, shore up what was said
and could be unsaid, like this, which says what truth
would hide and hides the way each word,
each breath we take, flows in, flows out,
and floods the blood with pounding air. This is the rage -
that all the words that flew like geese
above the fields as snow blew white
through yellow leaves and skeins of ice
were not water, water was not words, and leaves
us here, alone, as water rises, sandbags break
and all our rage is loosed across the fields and cities
we sought by this, with this, to protect.
