A fragment by Stan

Oh, the widening gyre and slouching beast–
       Who was it called them out?
Never more than twinkling eyes and ribald laugh
       With old Jane’s jokes passing over many a head,
Not heard by many outside that golden circle
       Thought seriously to be in search of a center.
Other days had their bitter tears: the odd bomb there;
       A wounding almost mortal; another that just was
By a hair’s breadth and stopped the wrong heart;
       So, appalled, the world quietly rifled files
To check the print, fine or not, to see if that was in the bargain.

So, send out the boys and hold on to the doves,
       Who can flutter awhile in their cages and preen feathers
And catch their breath each time an echo of booming ordinance
       Comes in from the shell-shocked fields
Where those boys sent forth experiment their way through
       The blood of their brothers, the hopes of their sisters,
Called on and on by older men–or was it some kindly uncle–
       Who calculated death for many, though not nearly enough.

Here’s the vision set before their eyes
       The writhing eyes on tumbrels, lungs reduced to shreds.
Hadn’t they heard that their brother was buying
       If they’d just stop the shooting, the lost parts, the strafing?
Oh, they will they hobble back on bleeding feet,
       No matter their boots gone. They always do.
Yet that one came back in strange silence and this one
       Held his badge to his heart, the only way to stop
that riot of noise, always there, that calls him
       To the thing he lacks, which was promised,
His stolen gift, now not so golden, which cried and cried
       From the earth which was his mother.

Can you rollercoaster in April, or in the merry month of May?
    Come now: enter the debate: where does the most cruelty lay?
If they could set apart their brothers in the field, 
      And disembowel their carcasses, then why not
Those whining at home about their share and lot,
       So like animals, so not like us, so apart,
Such a reminder of shames half hidden
      Either way you look, owner or owned,
drawn into two, split into four, uprooted and blowing in the wind.
      And for the few, a memory of paradise never had
Although it couldn’t have been like that.

 So now the boys are back and isn’t the party on?
     Though why does this one sit silent and that one
Mumbles and plots and picks invisibles from the floor.
      No herald came forward to pronounce good news.
Oh, somber voices cautioned all,
      Threw lights on riots in shaking heads,
Showed our hearts drowning in a shallow stream
      All will be made well, we say, all well,
By flivver and flapper, balding heads not to worry
      The ladies will come and go despite our pleading
And the loveliness of the pleats in our pants.

I began this poem as a response to a request from my father-in-law to write him a history of the Twenty-First Century as, he said, he was unlikely to see much of it. It seemed a fair project (and I’m still pulling together notes for it from time to time), but it also seemed likely I should review the Twentieth Century first, which is what this fragment attempts to do.  It’s a failure, though, because of its Euro and UScentricity neglecting all the rest of the world. I can only defend against those criticism by pointing out that most of the education offered in the universities of my days were centered on the United States and Europe and, up to mid-century, those two blobs of geography were real history makers in that they began or participated in most of the wars for resources (which means all the wars) of the period and both centers were engaged in either solidifying or resolidifying their empires.

Its also a failure because I didn’t make it much past the First World War for Resources (the proper view of colonial reaching) and, thus, have not quite covered thirty of the hundred years.

On the other hand, it is a declared fragment and my intention is to return to it as I have time.