On the 20th, the Israel Association of Writers in English is doing an evening on war poetry – one of their own and one of another.  Register here and you’ll get a link on the day of the event,  it starts at 8.

This is what I’m doing:

Dulce et Decorum Est 

WILFRED OWEN

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori

RECITAL

Karen Alkalay-Gut

‘Jenin

‘was nothing like you’ve seen on the screen.’

‘Jenin had no relief,’ he says, turning on the stool

away from the keys, pushing his thick hair

from his eyes with long movements. 

‘Jenin’ –

turning back to play a delicate chord –

‘was worse than I’d ever dreamed.  Even worse

than the café explosion Tel Aviv.  Jenin.  Have you ever been

in streets so close the houses and all the raging

people within lean ominously over you?’

‘Jenin.’ He dips with his delicate fingers onto the keys. 

‘Even the child who came out to me begging a cigarette’

– now the music twinkles like little stars

‘was only sent to distract me from the sniper

just behind.’

‘And everything was mined.

Like the man lying on the street who

 seemed mortally wounded.

I wanted to go to him – David held me back –

He blew up before my eyes.’

In the growing dim of the afternoon.

the music meanders from piece to piece.

‘I know why we went into Jenin.  That rusty nail

still in my thigh keeps reminding me of that day in the café.

I know why we went into Jenin.  I know why

we didn’t bomb from the air.’  He tries

a trill but it is wooden, disconnected,

and he continues without moving. 

‘We have enough

funerals of our own,

and I’ve outgrown

the eye for an eye creed

long ago.’ 

‘I have willed

to keep going

but I don’t know

how

we can ever

make music again.’