Two Poets, One Theme

From War Music – An Account of Books 16 to 19 of Homer’s Iliad
By Christopher Logue

Impacted battle. Dust above a herd.
Trachea, source of tears, sliced clean.
Deckle-edged wounds: “Poor Jataphact, to know,” knocked clean
Out of his armour like a half-set jelly
“Your eyes to be still open yet not see,” or see
By an abandoned chariot a dog
With something like your forearm in its mouth;
A face split off,
Sent skimming lidlike through the crunch
Still smiling, but its pupils dots on dice:
Bodies so intermixed
The tremor of their impact keeps the dead
Upright with the mass. Half-dragged, half-borne,
Killed five times over, Captol – rose with his oar,
Sang as his rapt ship ran its sunside strake
Through the lace of an oncoming wave – now splashed
With blood plus slaver from his chest to chin,
Borne back into the mass, itself borne back
And forth across the bay like cherry froth.
Someone breaks out; another follows him;
Throws, hits, rides on; the first – transfixed –
Hauls on the carefully selected pole
Trembling within his groin, and drags
His bladder out with it;
Then doubles popeyed back into the jam.
Notice the cousins, Little A. & Big – some team!
Prince Little loves to tease them with his arse:
“I’ll screw your widow, Pellity,”
Shouting head down, his face between his knees;
And the angered Trojan throws, he throws,
Twisting and catching what the other threw
And has the time to watch his leaf divide
His fellow soldier from the light, then goes
“No third green generation from his tree,”
Whistling away.
The Greeks swear by their dead. The Trojans by their home.

“Mr. Cogito Thinks About Blood”
By Zbigniew Herbert
Translated from the Polish by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter

1

Reading a book
on the horizons of science
the history of the progress of thought
from the murk of faith
to the light of knowledge
Mr. Cogito came upon an episode
that has darkened
his private horizon
with a cloud

a tiny contribution
to the obese history
of fatal human errors

for a long time
the conviction persisted
man carries in himself
a sizable reservoir of blood

a squat barrel
twenty-odd liters –
a trifle

from this we can understand
the effusive descriptions of battles
fields red as coral

gushing torrents of gore
a sky that repeats
infamous hecatombs

and also the universal
method of cure

the artery
of a sick man was opened
and the precious liquid
let lightheartedly out
into a tin basin

not everyone lived through it
Descartes whispered in agony
messieurs epargnez –

2

now we know exactly
that in the body of each man
the condemned and the executioner
scarcely flows
four to five liters
of what used to be called
the body’s soul

a few bottles of burgundy
a pitcher
one-fourth
of the capacity of a pail

very little

Mr. Cogito
is naively astonished
this discovery
did not create a revolution
in the domain of customs

at least it should incline
people to reasonable thrift

we may not
wastefully squander as before
on battlefields
on places of execution

really there isn’t much of it
less than water oil
our resources of energy

but it happened otherwise
shameful conclusions were drawn

instead of restraint
wastefulness

the precise measurement
strengthened nihilists
gave a greater impetus to tyrants
now they know exactly
that man is fragile
and it is easy to drain him of blood

four to five liters
an amount without significance

therefore the triumph of science
did not bring for thought
a principle of behavior
a moral norm

it is small consolation
thinks Mr. Cogito
that the exertions of scientists
have not changed the course of affairs

they hardly weigh as much
as the sigh of a poet

and the blood
continues to flow

goes beyond the horizons of the body
the limits of fantasy

-- probably there will be a deluge