by Stephen A. Meigs
Thought I would put here what I consider some of the best war and separation poems I have written. I suggest you read the poems before reading the explanations of them. These poems were all written in March 1996, in the order given.
This is about General Sherman, and how his insanity (a descent into hell) was merely an attempt to enter mind of the enemy, the slaveholders. On other level, it concerns insanity as an attempt to get inside mind of those who from evil abominations enslave women. I'm not entirely pleased with the line concerning "bloody traces."
Go ye down therefore
the very depths of hell.
They always will
so too therefore I.
Sadness lingers
I watch the sky
I have seen my soldiers die.
Powers of darkness
I defy you to tell
the reasons why I curse so well.
Not for you to understand
As I do.
I spit in your faces
I have danced
In your favorite places
I have command
Where only you are damned.
I switch places
I have chanced
Upon your bloody traces
I've cursed thee well
You'll down to hell.
The daylilies blossom
In a field of clover
The klondike bends with
the wind in indecision
I speak to my heart I have not sinned
I remember what she forgot.
This is about a girl who feels bad at having caused the death of a former German soldier. During World War II, he fought at a very young age, an age at which because of moral immaturity males must behave more from imitation than from the promptings of the soul. He shot someone with a rifle. As he grew older during war, he saw war for the revolting abomination it was. After war ended, he just couldn't accept that a pretty German girl praised his butchery as bravery and berated his humanity as cowardice. These thoughts plague his entire life, until now, in his old age, in 1996, he asks a pretty American girl whether he notices anything odd about his eye (his rifle eye). The shock that a girl so pretty could not notice this proof of his evil past causes his death. It is loosely modelled after a math professor I had who fought in that war on the German side.
It is not for you to tell
the punishment to give
he'd rather not live
I really don't want to
accomplish.
I saw a star
'Twas way off afar
I wandered off to greet it
He asked me if I've seen it.
Seen what? I asked.
(As if asking ever made a difference.)
The coldness in my eye,
he said,
And fell over dead.
Now I wander more carefully.
I cannot live I harmed that man,
Who meant no ill
but only wondered
if I had seen it.
This concerns how a noble fastidious spirit can choose dead inanimate space over people if people don't behave.
Dried walnuts sit in an empty cupboard
There they will stay to the end of time
The cellophane wrapper
It crumbles
To pieces finer than me
I wonder what is soon to be.
This deals with Tay Bridge disaster. As a child, I was fascinated by railroads and trainwrecks in particular, and read often in a book a section that detailed the Tay Bridge disaster. There was a nice painting in the book of a befuddled man standing right next to the disappeared part of the bridge, looking at the void where all the railroad cars plunged. Am I taking liberties equating the River Tay with the Firth of Forth? I thought I might be at first, but as it turns out the same book details how the collapse of the River Tay bridge finished its designer, who was just about to have built a magnificent bridge (that he had already designed) over the Firth of Forth. As a result of the first bridge's collapse, his project for the second was cancelled and given to someone else, who used a different design.
Also I am mentioning here that I am glad I didn't mention in a previous poem what I had decided Victoria's secret was, viz. testicular torture. (Semen contains PGE2, a chemical that increases sensitivity to pain, and which I suspect is used by sodomizers to increase the effectiveness of the pain these abusers like to inflict in an effort to dominate. Thus PGE2 tends to make testicles sensitive to pain, and so ideas of torturing testicles tend to be associated with cleanliness and anti-sodomy ideas. Unfortunately, I think the torture ideas as suggested by the looks of Victoria's Secret models had to do with world domination rather than anti-sodomy fantasies. Could it be that the founder of Victoria's Secret jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge to her death because she failed to understand the reasonableness of testicular torture as an anti-sodomy defense (as for instance in a woman kicking a man in the groin when she is being attacked by a forcefully sodomizing rapist), and had decided her feelings were sordid ones involving taking over the world? As an aside, I have noticed that lately (say after 1991) their models are boring and sometimes even dissipated looking, as if they are not in on the secret. One has to look at the older catalogues to judge my theory (say late 1989).
I'm glad I didn't say that
It made my bestest poem
But that's not why I'm glad I didn't say that.
I'm glad for the sky and for the earth and the men who die.
I'm saddened though I cannot shut the door quiet.
Riots cover the earth and
the good are not rewarded
According to worth.
There's a dearth of Godness
O'erlooking the end
Of the bridge
O'er the Firth of Forth
Only a good man dwelleth there.
More about it being proper to leave certain things unsaid. Also, I am trying to explain why it sometimes might be appropriate to suggest something untrue if one isn't given enough time to explain how things are exactly. For instance, you may have written a letter to someone who actually thinks you are writing to someone else who lives with her. Well, suppose at the last minute, after the letter is written and almost ready to go, you find out that, yes, the other person does actually live with her. If you are asked whether you knew that the other person actually did live with her, and can only say yes or no because she frowns on you saying much or because you have to transmit your information third hand and don't want to risk misunderstanding arising from improper translation, you will say no or suggest that the answer is no even though strictly speaking the answer is yes. A curious case of how lying (gainsaying the truth, I call it) is actually being more honest.
That has nothing to do with
Artistic Merit
It has to do with the dead
And what it is proper
To be left unsaid.
Having gainsaid the truth
He wonders why
Not the first time a lie is right
A comedian said.
I never lie.
I say what's right.
Times are it takes too long to explain
So I gainsay just to put the truth right.
This poem is about flipside of shame and a woman having a healthy respect for her own intelligence. Shame only works when the people around you are enlightened, and if humiliation is seen as loss of face rather than just as a peculiarly necessary indicator of error, the fear of it may lead to a harmful reluctance to accept truth. Similarly, though a very strong belief in rational intelligence is useful in dealing with matters such as addiction where the emotions might be expected to become biased, there are places where a failure to listen to emotion can cause real harm.
A gloom with pleasure in it
Reminds me of Hell.
A hell of my own construction
I'd rather be light at first
The semaphore in the down position
Means that I can go.
But that is not really it.
I'll be irrelevant.
An irrelevant odyssey
They will have fits
And I won't know why.
I don't really know why
They feel as I do.
Can't they see I'm right?
Is it proper to scoff
At a truth that's obviously
that?
Lying doesn't matter
They think
It's funner to
Laugh over drink
With idiots who tickle
And always agree.