By ‘To own a place where God is thought to be palpably present inspires a feeling perilously close to owning God.’
THE ACCIDENTAL EMPIRE, Gershom Gorenberg
Once the Empire’s Supreme Command had declared
the Coastal Territory ‘infidel-clean’,
the Empire’s Survey Force – with its tankers
containing drinking water and fuel oil,
its flat-bed lorries with pre-fabricated
accommodation blocks, toilets, showers,
its refrigerated food trucks and its mobile
generators – could proceed with confidence,
noting the drifts of refuse, the leaning
glassless windows, the skewed slabs
of concrete, the intermittent sharp scent
of putrefaction in the dusty air.
Occasionally they were surprised
by a bougainvillea still blooming
on a demolished wall, or a wooden shelf
of books still intact in a fallen house,
but the pools of drying sewage, and the piles
of broken furniture were predictable.
They established their base in the courtyard
of the Coastal Territory’s Holy Site –
with its fountains and its orange trees –
the birthplace of the Empire’s Patriarch,
and, throughout the cleansing, untouched.
From the arcaded gallery at the top
of the Patriarch’s mosaic-encrusted
tower all of the land could be seen,
the mountains in the east, the sea in the west,
the geometric blocks of streets and gardens –
and, inland, some leagues away, north and south
the Empire’s frontier posts and distant cities.
On the first day, the Force began its work
in sub-teams on foot and with drones:
some estimating the amount of rubble,
and the cost of clearing it; others
what should be re-built, for whom and at what cost;
others how the coast and the foothills
might become theme parks and tourist resorts.
The children appeared on the second day –
in the ruined shadows of a campus
with a museum, library and a school –
always far off, singly, then in pairs;
by day’s end, perhaps a dozen, some maimed,
some seemingly whole, standing close together,
watching from a distance like a silent,
impassive muster of witnesses.
‘Withdraw’, ordered the Supreme Command.
On the third day, after the Survey Force’s
long caravan was safely far beyond
the Territory’s borders, the Empire’s Air Force
carpet-bombed the ruined campus.
carpet-bombingdesolationGaza allegoryThe Accidental Empire
Alex Cox
August 30, 2024An excellent poem. What a terrible shame you had to write it!
Clive Watkins
September 6, 2024At one level, and at first, this poem mimics in the businesslike plainness of its language the voice of Authority and conveys the certainty that it is acting humanely – ‘tankers / containing drinking water and fuel oil’ / ‘flat-bed lorries with pre-fabricated / accommodation blocks, toilets, showers’, and so on; but in ‘could proceed with confidence, / noting…’ the voice tilts more strongly towards irony as bureaucratic thoroughness details the suffering that has been inflicted. In ‘the drifts of refuse, the leaning / glassless windows, the skewed slabs / of concrete, the intermittent sharp scent / of putrefaction in the dusty air’ we move, in fact, from the self-important grandiosity of ‘the Empire’s Supreme Command’ to a different and more disturbing kind of plainness. This tonal doubling continues in ‘Occasionally they were surprised / by a bougainvillea still blooming / on a demolished wall’ where we hear simultaneously the voice of Empire and an ironizing voice. (The epigraph, of course, bears upon these musings.)
With the temporal notations ‘On the first day’, ‘The children appeared on the second day’ and ‘On the third day’ (which pick up the title), what came into my mind was the structure of Edwin Muir’s well-known poem THE HORSES (which strikes me even more now than it did when I first read it sixty years ago as disconcertingly complacent), thus: ‘Barely a twelvemonth after… in the first few days … On the second day … On the third day … On the sixth day … And then, that evening / Late in the summer…’. Muir’s poem is set in a world almost totally destroyed by global war. Published in 1956, it sits with much other writing from the period concerned with the possibility of such an event. Behind Muir’s poem, of course, lies the foundational pattern offered by the first chapter of Genesis. Genesis and THE HORSES are in their different ways about beginnings, in Muir’s case, a new beginning that rejects the ‘old bad world that swallowed its children quick / At one great gulp’. By contrast, THE DAY AFTER appears to offer no consolation, only protest and warning. In this, it seems both more sardonic and bleaker than THE HORSES; it also strikes me as – depressingly – more realistic, closer in spirit perhaps to Owen’s famous dictum: ‘All a poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful’.
Finally, I am struck by the way the poem is built on a kind of implied mythology, one in which ‘Empire’, this being both the principle of Power and also the territory it seeks to enclose and control, feels itself endangered by insurgents or invaders. So, we have ‘the Empire’s Survey Force’, ‘the Coastal Territory’, then, more simply, ‘the Force’. What is essentially the same trope occurs in BORDER CONTROL: ‘Marauders / from the Southern Deserts are suspected’, ‘hostiles / massing on the Sparse Plains’, ‘the High Priestess’. The use in that poem of obscure place-names – ‘Trigozon’, ‘Atrigo’, ‘Marazon’ and ‘Atagorsh’ – enhance this effect. Curiously, the web appears silent on these names, though I may not have searched hard enough. Indeed, the impertinent thought occurs to me that they were invented for the poem, though, knowing the range of your learning, I cannot convince myself of this. But even if these names are indeed charged with important meanings, in the poem itself they work perfectly well as tokens of a mythical geography within which its ethical issues can be explored. (Another recent poem, ON THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF THE UNVIVERSITY, is framed in rather the same way, though there the locations and dramatis personae are more readily accessible. I am reminded somewhat of Cavafy’s way with history.)
Strong poems, David!
David Selzer
September 7, 2024A brilliant and scrupulous exegesis, Clive, as always. Thank you.
Yes, THE HORSES and Genesis – and more than a touch of Cavafy’s ‘way with history’.
You have unmasked me. All of this month’s pieces are, to a greater or lesser extent, allegories and/or fables posing as reportage. Plato would have been appalled!