D.A. Gray
Every War Poem Is a Love Poem
Another poet, after the open mic, tells me,
“I used to appreciate your war poems.
You seem to have quit writing them.”
And I imagine him in a world of partitions,
each topic separate from the rest
the occasional view from the door way
a rarity.
I didn’t tell him but I’ll tell you –
how mortars sometimes landed at the dinner
table thousands of miles away, and
sometimes my wife’s important secret
gets drowned by the roar of a generator, and
that dead look in the eyes of a self-styled
patriot is one I’ve seen before at the gate, and
it’s the expression of a man convinced
I’m a threat to the way he sees the world.
So, when I write of the laughter of children
waiting for the school bus, my hope
their parents will be home to greet them
when they return, or when a cousin
divides the world between lives that matter
and lives that don’t - I have to trust my training,
find the words. Or, when that the nervous-
looking man who walks into our theater glancing around
we hope he left the guns and brought the cannoli.
I know I’m writing of a war that hasn’t stopped.
I’m still scanning my sector, armed with cans
of food, hip pocket history lessons, and even the laughs
are acts of defiance. Because there’s still a hate,
back home inside the wire, slithering under
the borders we once thought protected us.
Ode to the Oud
If deployments into strange places came
with soundtracks, this one would be
the work of a solitary man playing the oud
in the corner of a makeshift Turkish café,
where a hand painted calligraphy
on a metal sign is the only clue
that this sterile white trailer is not
any other sterile white trailer
and this plot of sandy ground,
cordoned off by gleaming razor wire
is not prison but it is not not prison
and bent strings make one human
for a moment masking the low-throated
hum of generators, and calming a heart
racing so fast it takes a cup of extra
strong Turkish coffee to settle it down
and maybe, eventually, the world comes
into focus around these fingers, sliding
up and down the frets, coaxing something
that is not rage out of the curved body,
and on the second glance, the man
now holds an overgrown pear, sliced
in half, the shape of what you used
to pick from the orchard of your youth
finding respite from a hot southern sun,
cutting the tough flesh with a knife, difficult,
but life-sustaining, you thought while the wind
made a tune through bent branches.
“I still find myself fighting the urge to compartmentalize, as if the person in Iraq were different than the younger person resting under a pear tree, or the older person working on political and love poems. Even though the struggle seems the same. Being human and checking in on each other are common themes in war literature—we’re sometimes caught off-guard how important it is here.” —D.A. Gray
D.A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (FutureCycle Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Still: The Journal, Collateral Journal, Rattle: Poets Respond, and St. Katherine Review among others. He earned his MFA at the Sewanee School of Letters. A retired soldier, Gray now teaches, writes and lives in Central Texas.
