Naming the Dead

At his solo reading at the West Cork Literary Festival Brian Turner was asked why he went to fight in Iraq when he was well educated and believed the war was wrong. He answered with names of his fellow soldiers - comradeship Remarque wrote was the only good thing to come out of war.

Auden wrote in his 1940 elegy for Freud and victims of the war:

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,

when grief has been made so public, and exposed

to the critique of whole epoch

the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak?. . . [i]

Yeats ends “Easter, 1916” with a flourish on the power of poetry:

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse [Perse}

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born

And Neruda wrote:

Someone will ask later, sometimes

searching for a name, his own or someone else's

why I neglected his sadness or his love

or his reason or his delirium or his hardships:

and he'll be right: it was my duty to name you . . .

But I didn't have enough time or ink for everyone. [ii]

[i] ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’

[ii] Pablo Neruda, ‘For All to Know’ in Pablo Neruda, Winter Garden, trans. William O'Daly, Port Townsend, Copper Canyon Press, 1986, p19.

from my manuscript the art of forgetting

March 22

Nestor speaks: ‘There all the best of us then were slain;

there lies warlike Ajax, there Achilles, there Patroclus,

god-like in counsel, and there lies my dear son . . ‘

The heroes, loved by the gods, fall into darkest night headfirst.

Death takes no prisoners, neither does Homer.

The gods enjoy the intimacy of gladiator killing

and the spectacle of tracer shells ripping the night sky.

From the verandah a neighbour and I watch a massive quarrel

with thunder then stars emerge from beneath the e magician’s coat.

Time to turn back, faithful to the hum of electricity,

the sounds of the radio and television,

the constant noise.