Consulting an Elder Poet on an Anti-War Poem for Elizabeth Bishop

by Duane Niatum

You said to me that day,
“There’s nothing you can do,”
and spoke of Auden’s line:
“Poetry makes nothing happen.”
And though I honor you,
especially your poems,
the objects you dipped in light,
then, left in the rainbow,
let slip from our sight,
I admitted, diving out of self,
a sweet woman’s white caress,
the hundreds of lives and places
in books, failed to counter confusion.

You did agree that it
was Socrates who said
to his Athenian friends
that governments are only
governments with many heads
and cannot think as one.
That history continues to show
how they swing from war
to peace and back again,
in one wide gallow-sweep
just as the pendulum
of the world’s clocks
returned its towns to craters.

Now I must ask myself,
fifteen cobalt-blue years later,
if the dust of each new war
that settles in our bones,
and deadens a generation,
is no more than negatives
of the Kennedys, King, and Lennon,
has less weight than what
we felt the day the Apollo
spaceship landed on the moon,
and Auden’s line is true,
then why did you to the end,
live with the dark,
sing into your ruin?

Duane Niatum, “Consulting an Elder Poet on an Anti-War Poem” from Drawings of the Song Animals: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 1991 by Duane Niatum. Reprinted by permission of Holy Cow! Press.