[matilda] A Belt of Fire, A Crown of Leaves

[Benjamin Major]

Hi,

I hope that everyone has hugged and made up at tonights social. Here, a poem 
for you all, who spend so much of your day locked in e-mail combat. Take 
note, in the last stanza; flame man and blood man say to each other; 'We’re 
bound to fight: it’s all we have, our common ground.’. Let's not be flame 
man nor blood man; please be aware that so many of the e-mails sent in the 
last two days haven't got anyone anwhere; why do we seek to perpetuate our 
conflicts, why do we want to simulate on a small scale the despair, hatred 
and mistrust that permeates the rest of the world?

Anyway, I'll let the poem speak for itself...



A Belt Of Fire, A Crown Of Leaves
by Carol Rumens

I dreamed about the simplest thing:
Two men fighting. One was bloody foam.
The second, swirling over him, in flame,
Frantically tried to end the blood-man’s writhing.
Time and again, into that gasping head,
The rifle butt swung down. My dream voice told me
These soldiers were past soldiering: flame-man’s pitted
Onslaught was a last-ditch act of mercy
Although it looked like rage. And I was sure
That when they sank together, blood and fire
Would flare again like an old friendship, bond it.
But when I woke I knew myself a liar.
These two were locked in endless, hellish war.
They’d fought it to the death: they’d fight beyond it.


They’d fought it to the death: they’d fight beyond it.
They’d fight it in the trenches, in the hedges
And coffee shops and caves, and on the bridges:
They’d fight it with the fear they’d never find it.
They’d fight it on the boards of advanced studies,
And on the heights of learning. On the moon,
Bleached faintly by moon sunshine, but un-torn,
Their rigid flag still cries, ‘It’s ours now, buddies!’
Perhaps if we’d gone native, somehow learned
Moon-manners from the lack of atmosphere
We might have found a way to live, suspended
In mutability. Our heels as homeless
And feathery and quick as those of Hermes,
We’d diet on stars; no need for agriculture.


Our diet starts! No need for agriculture –
A happy breed of gene-re-coded men,
We share exact, un thieved supplies. What then?
How will we choreograph so fixed a future?
No killing-field, no concentration-camp,
No no-man’s land – but where will vision go
Without hard ground to struggle over, stamp
With forts and bones? We’ll die, who learned to grow
Human and beautiful. Remember once,
When wishful flags bore neither stripes nor stars,
But apples? When we sang that all we needed
Was love, and dreamed that governments acceded?
Womanly times, we chanted. War is man’s.
We’ve always said that those bastards were from Mars.


We always said those bastards were from Mars,
But others knew war’s Venus side: their daddies,
Brothers, lovers, sons wore brilliant scars,
Wore stone. They sorrowed at their hollow bodies,
And when they got the chance, stood to attention
And knew it was all lies, the fear of blood,
Delicate mortals, motherly convention.
Others still fiercer in their sisterhood
Felt the fire-belt weave inside them where
The crying had begun. They slipped it on,
Modelled it for the dead, their army bling,
And swept their shawls and skirts into a pyre,
And dedicated thus their suffering:
They burned and bled as well as any man.


They burned and bled as well as any man,
Once lit. There was some minor variation.
The brittler bones in age, the pale striation
And limpness of some areas of skin
Suggested they had been designed for more
Or less – but it was more or less the same
In their ascendant years. They wanted power
Since wisdom without power remains a form
Of ignorance. And so the monster breeds,
Petted by every hand that marks its cross,
Demos, homely hermaphrodite fool,
Or Theos, promising a good deal less.
Oh, womanly times, oh, widows, sisters, brides,
Truly you did not turn the word to well.


Truly you did not turn the word from ill,
Either, you holy men. A sage once said,
‘Religion’s like the weather, very good
Sometimes, and at times completely dreadful.’
Dreadful. It was too small a word last Christmas
When weather burst out of the sea in slews
Of hydro-concrete, jet-propelled, its fathoms
Crashing through frail-skinned human things. But this is
What war does nightly, on and off the News,
Stamped with our science, our gods, our guarantee.
We cry at what blind waves do, but resist
Dissection of the shatter-work of bombs,
The running fires that have our votes and eyes.
Religion’s worse than weather. So are we.


‘Religion’s worse than weather. So are we
To stop?’ Flame-man and blood-man paused. ‘We’re bound
To fight: it’s all we have, our common ground.’
And each once more seized his antagonist.
Coldly I sat and typed their dreary tale
In language that I knew I couldn’t trust.
The sky outside gradually grew pale;
Once, I was staring as a rainbow thrust
It’s stalk into the clouds. I dreamed again –
This time, about two giants. Hammer Rain
And Mad Sun cracked heads till one rolled free,
And spilled green, fragrant blood. Then it was spring.
My pregnant daughter’s daughter danced for me.
I dreamed about the simplest human thing.