A Cold Coming
"A cold coming we had of it."
I saw the charred Iraqi lean
his windscreen wiper like a pen
his windscreen wiper like a quill
I saw the charred Iraqi lean
as though he'd stopped to ask the way
'Don't be afraid I've picked on you
Isn't it your sort of poet's task
If that gadget that you've got records
press RECORD before some dog
So I held the shaking microphone
'I read the news of three wise men
three foes of ours, three wise Marines
three wise soldiers from Seattle
Did No. 1 say: God be thanked
And No. 2: O praise the Lord
And No. 3: Praise be to God
So if their fate was to be gassed
and though cold corpses in Kuwait
Excuse a skull half roast, half bone
It may seem out of all proportion
They seemed the masters of their fate
Was it a propaganda coup
disinformation to defeat us
Symbolic billions in reserve
On Saddam's pay we can't afford
Sad to say that such high tech's
If you can conjure up and stretch
the image of me beside my wife
(I let the unfleshed skull unfold
and idly tried to calculate
the sperm in one ejaculation
times, roughly, let's say, 12.5
Let's say the sperms were an amount
2,500 times at least
Whichever way Death seems outflanked
Poor bloblings, maybe you've been blessed
according to Sophocles i.e.
a philosophy that's maybe bleak
but difficult these days to escape
When you see men brought to such states
or in the world of Cruise and Scud
spared the normal human doom
He heard my thoughts and stopped the spool:
Though all Hell began to drop
I was filled with such a yearning
such a longing to be beside
and, most, to have engendered there
So press RECORD! I want to reach
Don't look away! I know it's hard
so disfigured by unfriendly fire
Though fire has flayed off half my features
till some screen-gazing crop-haired boy
equipped by ingenious technophile
and made the face you see today
an icon framed, a looking glass
a mirror that returns the gaze
and in the end stares out the watcher
or behind the flag-bedecked page 1
I doubt victorious Greeks let Hector
and who'd want to sour the children's joy
or ageing mothers overjoyed
But cabs beflagged with SUN front pages
Stars and Stripes in sticky paws
Each Union Jack the kids now wave
But praise the Lord and raise the banner
Desert Rat and Desert Stormer
the semen-bankers are all back
With seed sown straight from the sower
Lie that you saw me and I smiled
Lie and pretend that I excuse
pretend I pardon and forgive
pretend they have the burnt man's blessing
that only fire burnt out the shame
the deaths, the torture and the plunder
Say that I'm smiling and excuse
Pretend I've got the imagination
That's your job, poet, to pretend
It's easier to find such words
So lie and say the charred man smiled
This gaping rictus once made glad
hearts growing older by the minute
I've met you though, and had my say
I gazed at him and he gazed back
Facing the way the charred man faced
a test-tube frozen in the dark,
a pilgrimage of Cross and Crescent
Rainbows seven shades of black
and instead of gold the frozen crock's
the congealed geni who won't thaw
cold spunk meticulously jarred
a bottled Bethlehem of this come-
I went. I pressed REWIND and PLAY
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***The poem is from Tony Harrison's A Cold
Coming: Gulf War Poems. (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1991. p.
7-16) All Rights Reseved. Used with permission by Bloodaxe Books, 2002-2004. |