Life At War

There is a method to this madness! This is a picture of Kim Phuc specifically, who wrote a beautiful book about this moment and many others. But, as I read Denise Levertov, I felt it described this particular picture more deeply. I will return to Kim's words however as I feel, she has something to say also. Im trying to mesh two peoples sensitivities....But in actuality ...There are no WORDS!

http://http//www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=181968

Life at War

by Denise Levertov

The disasters numb within us

caught in the chest, rolling

in the brain like pebbles. The feeling

resembles lumps of raw dough

weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.

Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .

Could I say of it, it overflows

with bitterness . . . but no, as though

its contents were simply balled into

formless lumps, thus

do I carry it about.’

The same war

continues.

We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,

our lungs are pocked with it,

the mucous membrane of our dreams

coated with it, the imagination

filmed over with the gray filth of it:

the knowledge that humankind,

delicate Man, whose flesh

responds to a caress, whose eyes

are flowers that perceive the stars,

whose music excels the music of birds,

whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,

whose understanding manifests designs

fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

still turns without surprise, with mere regret

to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk

runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,

transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,

implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

We are the humans, men who can make;

whose language imagines mercy,

lovingkindness we have believed one another

mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

who do these acts, who convince ourselves

it is necessary; these acts are done

to our own flesh; burned human flesh

is smelling in Vietnam as I write.

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space

in our bodies along with all we

go on knowing of joy, of love;

our nerve filaments twitch with its presence

day and night,

nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,

nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,

the deep intelligence living at peace would have.