Bellicose Veins: Poems

By Gannon Hamilton

Bellicose Veins is a book of poems concerned with the dimensions of war and warfare, both in actual theatres of conflict and in those domains that we are accustomed to thinking of as peaceful. The poems are arranged in suites or series dealing with key moments in the life of the poet. The forms are invented in agreement with poetic content. Even though the subject matter runs from the Second World War into the new millennium, this book should be of increasing global relevance as we face current and future political challenges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991767236

Book preview

Author

Introduction

My father was in the North Atlantic, defending convoys against U-boats. In Vernon, BC, when I was five, we watched war footage on Saturday afternoons. Army cadets drilled in front of the barracks that had been an internment camp, twelve years before the Japanese girl in my kindergarten class and I were born. My mother asked the khaki-clad boy on duty if my brother and I might climb inside one of their Sherman tanks, and he obliged. He could have been the older brother of a local boy who, in the previous year had chanced upon an unexploded ordinance on a former practice range behind his house; the sense of his being a war casualty was later enhanced by two officers who stood before our first grade class, pointing to mortars and artillery shells on a big chart.

Several months passed and as I lay on the couch recovering from flu, TV programming was interrupted by the announcement that the President had been shot. I first learned of the Vietnam War after a move to Vancouver, where my friend Peter and I praised one another’s war-play realism. Months later in Seattle, kids were discouraged from talking about the conflict; my best friend Scott’s father was a landing gear specialist. I pondered this in the ensuing years, after a move to Edmonton, where there was mention on the radio of an expanded bombing campaign, but where the adults around me discussed the cold war in more general terms. There, I joined Air Cadets, received flight training and learned how to shoot.

Moving to Windsor, our family drove through Detroit’s burnt out core: MAD, the acronym for mutually assured destruction in thermonuclear war was in common use by then and the question was not if, but when this would occur. It affected our vision for the future, but how or in what way remained uncertain. University demystified the concepts of low intensity war and war for profit. Refugees told stories that didn’t line up with news broadcasts: balanced reportage about civilians caught in the middle and atrocities on both sides. A decade later, talk about peace plans and reconciliation foreclosed on any in-depth accounting; public zeal for closure left the illusion of peace, the mass violence of poverty and our bellicose paradigm intact.

Another twenty years went by, with spin still substituting for historical analysis, Memorial Day still used to promote the current campaign, Joseph Conrad, William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Wilfred Owen, Randal Jarrell, Robert Bly and June Jordan still relevant; they neither bitch nor preach, none of them tries to cajole us with a make-believe peace. That there is no such thing as a demilitarized zone is not a thesis to be proven with a research document. It has to be intuited. It wasn’t my conscious intention to write war poems; these ashes precipitated out of paradox, accumulating in the imaginary DMZ, across these Americas, for which I feel unfathomable love.

Bellicose Veins

Cambodian Lament

                Unable to pack enough rations for his term on patrol,

                soldier goes hungry but finally, grudgingly,

                gives away his position with a grenade in the river,

                            plucks out the stunned fish and moves on.

                Hummingbird has a pretty wife and a handsome family

                but to feed them he must seek the splendid blossom;

                his journey brings him to the bloom at dusk,

                            and when he enters she encloses him.

                Monkey in the forest canopy is food; soldier shoots,

                shattering the arm that clutches her infant; she hangs

                from a vine and before he can shoot again, she sees

                            into the part of him kept secret from himself.

                Dawn comes and hummingbird returns home to find

                his children perished from starvation;

                his wife smells perfume, accuses him of infidelity

                            and tells him she wishes never to see him again.

                He throws himself on the night fire, the human flower;

                the monsoon carries off ashes, draws ancestors near,

                but the fallen leave a scar, deep in our dreams

                            and their eyes take the place of our own.

Boycott

                            Not poverty’s ignorance but another brand, across the bar,

                                        a drunken plea for me to stop;

                            reeling from a different brew, I say distiller be damned,

                                        shut the consumer down;

                            the matter now open, palms rise, rejecting complicity,

                                        among the forms denial