Here War Is Simple

Here War Is Simple by W H Auden

Here war is simple like a monument:

A telephone is speaking to a man;

Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;

A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,

Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,

And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,

And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,

And we can watch a thousand faces

Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places

Where life is evil now:

Nanking. Dachau.

Vignettes

1.

So you leave, without a backward glance

And you leave without a good bye.

What about those who will miss you

And what happens to those you leave behind?

2.

As the year advances towards closure

And the colder months draw nearer,

The days draw the evenings closer,

The nights, longer and more intimate.

The leaves change colour and gently drift off

And hidden branches reach out their spidery fingers

To trap the colours of the late evening sky.

Found!

Rediscovered an old favourite....

The River
AK Ramanujan
(1929 - 1993)

In Madurai,
city of temples and poets,
who sang of cities and temples,
every summera river dries to a tricklein the sand,
baring the sand ribs,
straw and women's hairclogging the watergates
at the rusty barsunder the bridges with patches
of repair all over them
the wet stones glistening like sleepy
crocodiles, the dry ones
shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun

The poets only sang of the floods.
He was there for a day
when they had the floods.
People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water,
risingon the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant womanand a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.

The new poets still quoted
the old poets, but no one spoke
in verseof the pregnant woman
drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
kicking at blank walls
even before birth.

He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year
and then
it carries awayin the first half-hour
three village houses,
a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman
expecting identical twins
with no moles on their bodies,
with different coloured diapers
to tell them apart.

You can read more of Ramanujan's beautiful verse from http://oldpoetry.com/oauthor/show/A.K._Ramanujan